Ninth Anniversary

One night of knee-deep snow 
my adventure started—
pulled from the supper table, 
thrown into a police car, 
packed off on a train,
and locked up in a room.
Its ninth year ended three days ago.

In the corridor a man on a stretcher 
is dying open-mouthed on his back, 
the grief of long iron years in his face.

I think of isolation,
             sickening and total,
                    like that of the mad and the dead:
first, seventy-six days
     of a closed door's silent hostility, 
then seven weeks in a ship's hold. 
Still, I wasn't defeated:
my head
              was a second person at my side.

I've forgotten most of their faces 
—all I remember is a very long pointed nose— 
yet how many times they lined up before me!
When my sentence was read, they had one worry:
                                                to look imposing.
                                                They did not.
They looked more like things than people:
like wall clocks, stupid
                     and arrogant,
and sad and pitiful like handcuffs, chains, etc.

A city without houses or streets. 
Tons of hope, tons of grief.
The distances microscopic.
Of the four-legged creatures, just cats.

I live in a world of forbidden things! 
To smell your lover's cheek:
                            forbidden.
To eat at the same table with your children:
                                                         forbidden.
To talk with your brother or your mother
without a wire screen or a guard between you:
                                                         forbidden.
To seal a letter you've written
or to get a letter still sealed:
                              forbidden.
To turn off the light when you go to bed:
                                                 forbidden.
To play backgammon:
                    forbidden.
And not that it isn't forbidden,
     but what you can hide in your heart and have in your hand
             is to love, think, and understand.

In the corridor the man on the stretcher died.
They took him away. 
Now no hope, no grief,
                    no bread, no water,
                    no freedom, no prison,
                    no wanting women, no guards, no bedbugs, 
                    and no more cats to sit and stare at him.
                            That business is finished, over.

But mine goes on:
my head keeps loving, thinking, understanding, 
my impotent rage goes on eating me,
and, since morning, my liver goes on aching. . .

20 January 1946