In the Museum of the Resistance

In the museum of the resistance
the last room opens on the first,
you can see the end from the beginning,
as they who are captured here—
behind the glass, in shoes and pipes and radios,
in typed words that dent paper and stagger slightly,
in grainy film where they make again the again the same gestures,
in snapshots from which
one face, one thought, alarm, or careless attention,
dimly reaches out—they could not do.

Around to the right we follow
from case to case,
exhibits of impossible choices.
We feel the sudden ridiculous entrance of the tyrant,
the boots and iron,
and like the men in suits and honorable collars,
stiff at the civic table, we ask—what?
of what inscrutable fate, as certainty slips away?

The snow queen’s mirror breaks in slow motion,
sends slivers of ice to the heart;
human blood should melt them.
It does in the children's story.
But this is a story in which
horrors may be avoided if imagination refuses.
The blank brutality seeming, and perhaps in fact,
random: what are the odds? what do we know?
In this story some have a courage that will be mad,
that will be an equal violence.

Some will wear the uniform and some
will watch the uniforms, with out without expression,
and some will bargain and some will plot
in cellars and woodlots
 destruction by any means.

In white churches the citizens
may turn in their hymnals to instructions
for making bombs out of household objects,
mechanical pencils, say,
the shaft filled with cupric chloride that
when crushed with pliers or the heel of a boot,
begins to eat the wire holding the striker,
so the striker may fly
down the hollow center of the detonator,
to the waiting percussion cap.

A bridge goes down;
ten citizens are taken and hanged,
pictures are displayed. Officials plead for calm.
Death calls for death, stroke for stroke.
What is the weight of a gesture?
Or the story of a gesture, for we are told
a secret: the king
never wore the star.

Here in the last room is a letter
smuggled out of the cell, by whom?
The silvery snail trace of pencil and human hand:
Mother, it says,
I am to be executed, at dawn tomorrow.
As I love life, I know that what we do
is right. It must go on,
it will go on. I have no regret,
I am not afraid (or something like that, in Danish).

It is a mystery.
From the stained glass window
a blue, equable radiance washes over
this one and the ones beside it
on stands like alters.