II.iv



   I am writing this poem
       about the 1965 massacre
     of Indonesians by Indonesians

   which in an article ten years later
       I could not publish
     except in Nottingham England with

   a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since
       himself been murdered
     no one will say by whom but I will guess

   seeing as this is
       precisely poetry
     the CIA's and now Peking's Cambodian

   assassins the Khmer Serai                    [cf. Becker 433-36]
       In that article I estimated
     a half-million or more

   killed in this period                        Scott '75 209
       it took Noam in a book
     suppressed by its first publisher

   to quote Admiral Sudomo
       of the Indonesian junta
    more than 500,000

   and now Amnesty International
       many more than one million               Chomsky I 208
      so much for my balanced prose

   But none of us experienced
        that pervasive smell of death
       those impassable rivers

   clogged with corpses
        Robert Lowell is that why
       even you a pacifist

   had so little so say about it?
        Or you gentle reader
       let us examine carefully

   the good reasons
        you and I
       don't enjoy reading this

   Like the time
        in the steep Engadine
       we saw the silent avalanche

   fall away from the mountain
        hair and eyebrows
       the first to feel

   the murmurations
        of the spreading
       killer wind