ON TRAGEDY
“The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.”
—Joseph Stalin
The first one in the line of them
is a small black man who whispers with an accent
that hints of cafés and boulevards and French,
how they ran a current from his testicles
to his ears, and, because you are a good person
and because the water has not risen,
you weep and your dreams are full of light bulbs
and the stench of burning flesh.
The second one is taller, and he screams
that they hung him from the ceiling, with a cord
tied to his wrists until his shoulders tore,
and, though the water rises higher, you weep
again and dream of trees with broken branches,
because you are a good person and because
good people care. The third one—one plus one plus one—
is a fat man who told them what they wanted
after he was tortured and forced to watch
his sister raped, and the water rises
to your kneecaps, and you have a migraine headache,
and you dream of bed sheets filled with roaches,
but you force yourself to listen, since you need
to be a good person and you need to care.
After one plus one plus one plus one
and so on, you begin to think each torture
is like every other—if you’ve heard one rape,
you’ve heard them all—and the water
is lapping at your nostrils, and you are drinking
in the evening so that you will not dream,
and you are hoping they will finish, but
you’ll stay until the line ends, if it ever does,
because you don’t know who you are if
you’re not a good person and don’t care. |
