CHRIS BRANDT

FOR HENRY KISSINGER

Is it too late to curse you, Henry?
Is it time to have the years obscure your crimes?

Time to close that chapter,
let bygones be gone, give it a rest, let it be?

No.
It is not too late, Henry.

And thus begins our curse.
Be it never too late,

do you hear your victims' voices
shouting after your dotage: Assassin! Thief!

Because you sat well-tailored in handsome offices
and sent others out to prove your power,

because you wrote, "With proper tactics
nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears,"

because you found white phosphorous a useful tool
and napalm an arm of diplomacy,

and agent orange necessary
to policy, and tiger cages,

because you didn't understand why we should allow a country to go
communist on account of its own people's ignorance,

because you enjoyed the company of Pinochet,
Marcos, Duvalier, Stroessner, Somoza, the Shah,

because you regretted Laos and Cambodia—
"We should have found some other way of doing it,"

because you killed Allende and shattered Neruda's heart
as surely as if you had held the gun yourself,

because although you were born a Jew
you aspire to the Prussian,

because in the mirror you see a god—Hermes, Loki,
because you accepted the Nobel Peace Prize,

because you have a mind for deciding life and death,
and it's pure injustice of history that you're not still doing it—

may the insects refuse to touch you, may the worms spit you back,
may you never know decay's comfort and rest.

Let the voices follow you always.
Let the burning children run toward you forever

clasping you in their burning arms.
Let your eternal waiting room be

the stadium in Santiago, filled with silent prisoners filing
past. Each one stops to look at you,

and you, with all the time in the world
cannot look away.

None mentions bruises, burns,
missing fingernails, teeth, faces,

each only recited a name—
Elena, Nguyen, Christofis, Bobby Jene, Laureano,

and one of them hands you a snapshot of his daughters,
another his unused high school registration card,

a third the unfinished history of her family,
a fourth holds out a stuffed penguin, won

at a carnival moments before his arrest,
the next carries nothing, having no hands,

gives you only her look, and whispers
a poem, a hymn to the wind.

The line of the disappeared goes on and on
and you will stand rooted,

seeing them at last. And always,
always you will hear the songs of love

Victor Jara continues to sing
even without

his tongue.

Chris Brandt is a writer and activist. Also a teacher, translator, carpenter, furniture designer, and theatre worker. With Veronica Golos and Angelo Verga, he founded Against the Tide: Poets for Peace to sponsor readings against war, and 3Poets4Peace, to give readings to raise funds for the peace movement. He created the Bluefields Poetry Exchange, a reading series to promote the Sister City solidarity relationship between the Lower East Side and Bluefields, Nicaragua (1988-91). His poems and essays have been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About the Police (Soft Skull, edited by Jackie Sheeler); Lateral (Barcelona); El signo del gorrion (Valladolid); La Jornada (Mexico); Phati'tude; Appearances; TheUnbearables; National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side; and Crimes of the Beats. His translations of Cuban fiction have been published in The New Yorker and by Seven Stories Press, and of two volumes of Carmen Valle’s poetry by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Seven Stories has just published his translation of Clara Nieto’s Masters of War, a history of U.S. interventions in Latin America.