When I contemplate the hecatombs of violence
Done by human beings to one another,
Going all the way back to our collective
Invasion of the hominin worlds beyond
The Africa of our long genesis;
When I contemplate, in sharper focus,
The atrocities of just our scientific century,
From the Belgian Congo via the Somme
To the Cultural Revolution and Rwanda,
My fear and nausea become personal.
No abstract principle or religious icon
Enters the picture. No, it’s you:
The dread thought of such brutality
Being visited upon your singular beauty -
And my being helpless to avert it.
If, at Babi Yar, the Einsatzgruppen
Gunned down thirty thousand helpless Jews
Into a forest ravine, within two days;
What is that, among the tens of millions?
Only fearful empathy stirs one’s horror.
Such empathy arises, like a bloody mist,
When I imagine us among the thirty thousand,
Shepherded out of Kyiv by the SS,
Dread misgivings growing as we’re marched
Into the Wald on a fell morning.
You I want to shelter with my body.
You I’d shield by any means at all.
Your slaughter is the inexpiable crime;
Mine the inextinguishable lament -
If, at Babi Yar, I cannot save you.