The guillotine at least was swift. After
the head pitched sideways into a basket
and was raised to a thirsty crowd that roared
approval of death from above, the sun turned
a garish yellow and froze on the horizon
raying out behind the jellied blood the way
it once stood still over Jericho at Joshua’s command
and the day held its breath. . . .
After they sawed through Nicholas Berg’s neck
with an inadequate knife while he screamed,
after the heads of Daniel Pearl
and Paul Johnson were detached
in midthought, in terror but
caught alive on a grainy video, what
did their stored oxygen enable them to mouth,
and Kim-Sun-il who danced his last lines
declaiming over and over on worldwide television
I don’t want to die what rose from his lips?
It was always night behind the blindfold.
Like bats in midflight at dusk
scrolling their thread messages come
words we can never capture, the soul
perhaps flying out from whatever aperture?
—a pox on belief in the soul!—and yet
there’s no denying we are witness to
something more than
involuntary twitching going on
the air filling with fleeing souls
as it did in 1790, and filling again today
this poem a paltry testimony
to the nameless next and next—
Turks, Bulgarians, Filipinos whose heads
—severed, it is said the head retains
several seconds of consciousness—
will roll, reroll as in revolution
a time of major crustal deformation
when folds and faults are formed
time enough, in several languages
to recite a prayer, compose a grocery list
as the day holds its breath.
from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007
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