You who eat clean scarlet runner beans,
green apples, coarse sweet brown bread,

who sleep under cool sheets smooth as glass
and breathe in orchard breezes blown over
new-mowed grass,

who love the body’s flesh and contours,
revere the grasp of infant fingers
and gnarled arthritic hands

can now no longer not know
that darkborn things came up from hell,
in your name beat out bloody screams,
scarmarred smooth motherborne flesh,
threw fellow beings alive into furnaces,
and drenched frail flesh with icy flood
until fists pulled out hair like fingernails.

To them, it is meaningless
as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass
that we will read a commination in the streets
for torturers selected and appointed,
sow salt on their graves.

But it is true, not much . . . and late. . . .but true,
that now, tentatively, and with quiet motions,
perhaps as yet voiceless, gravely,
we can dare again to tend the apple trees,
bake bread, carry spiders out unharmed,
in time, kiss children without shame,
lie naked and vulnerable all night in lovers’ arms,
until the hour comes

for smooth and silken winding sheets
free of sweat and blood and smothered breath,
when we may lay our ransomed flesh decently in earth
no longer filled with dirt-choked screams,
under winds no longer agony-laden slaves of pain.

Line 17 from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men