Like photographs of Dutch Schultz which show a slick haired, ordinary man with unmatched eyes, there is nothing evil in this face. Pol Pot is a bland, jowly, full-lipped man. Murder. Torture. Genocide. The big words leave no mark on this small human face. His photograph has first place on these walls, mosaicked with the snapshots of the dead. Looking into the eye of the camera their eyes focus down the well of terror -- a child, his upper lip already slashed; a man grinning madness; a woman, blank faced with one tear, clasps her infant. In the presence of full face or profile or candids of the stick-limbed forced to smile up from beds of torture, I move face to face. My eyes supersede the camera. Obsessed, I feel obligated to look one by one, as though by meeting each pair of eyes I might... But all I can do is make them into words. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HOW THEY GO ON by JAMES GALVIN SUGGESTED BY THE COVER OF A VOLUME OF KEATS'S POEMS by AMY LOWELL BRUTUS AND ANTONY by EDGAR LEE MASTERS THE RUSSIAN ARMY GOES INTO BAKU by ALICIA SUSKIN OSTRIKER MIDSUMMER FROST (1) by ISAAC ROSENBERG BEFORE THE FLOWERS OF FRIENDSHIP FADED FADED: 21 by GERTRUDE STEIN |