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...FIVE EYES by WALTER JOHN DE LA MARE BROTHER AND SISTER by MARY ANN EVANS EVENING HYMN by REGINALD HEBER SPRING by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM by WALLACE STEVENS PRAIRIE MUSIC by NELLIE COOLEY ALDER THALIA by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH DESCRIBES THE PLACE WHERE CYNTHIA IS SPORTING HERSELF by PHILIP AYRES IN VINCULIS; SONNETS WRITTEN IN AN IRISH PRISON: HOW SHALL I BUILD by WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT |