3. Those who speak like you have lost whole empires
And protested less than I have for my slides.

4. Content to watch your life roll by, or roll away,
You cast not just your past but yourself into the sea!

5. I lived that life already, in reverse.

6. As a boy I ceased to question before my mouth had even opened;
I had barely learned to speak before I sealed my lips.

7. I searched the dictionaries of desire,
I consulted the archives of despair;

8. I found in them the words to name my grief,

9. But I never expected answers,
And then I never asked.

10. I wandered silently all these years,
Asking nothing, and finding nothing in return.

11. For years, so many years, I was you,
But silence breeds more noise than silence bears!

12. And now I make my own demand
Upon the God of heaven and of earth:

13. I do not ask you, God, to return my mother,
Nor my father, nor my years of youth.

14. I do not ask for riches, wisdom, power, life eternal,
Nor even for justice, or mercy, or love.

15. All I ask for are the images I created of the world.

16. Return my images to me, O God, and I shall return—
Renew my slides as of old!”

X.

1. Then God answered William Landsmann out of the whirlwind,
saying:

2. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man:
For I will ask, and you will answer me.

3. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

4. Did you draw the gentle stoop of a too-tall girl
Who walks the earth with her neck bent forward
Humbling her head before each day’s face?

5. Did you snap a picture of the kick
Of a tall girl’s sister, sharing her bed,
Who tosses and turns in troubled sleep—
Or of the kick felt deep within the womb
Of a tall girl lying in silent fright?

6. Did you photograph a canopy of hanging stars,
Or the flicker of a flame that eats a rag
Stuffed into a pipe of gas—
Or the face of a boy with nostrils charred,
Sleeping peacefully at last?

7. Did you photograph the loneliness
Of a child raised in clothes too small,
In a room too small, in a house too small,
In a world too small for the smallest corner of his heart,
The tug of a too-small coat across his thin and growing shoulders,
Or the soft brush of his mother’s lips on his earlobe’s edge,
As he turns beneath his blankets, feigning sleep,
Pretending he does not feel the watch she keeps?

8. Did you print the picture of a push of one man against another
In a fire-and-brimstone storm,
Or the sudden trip of a foot in a hole,
That dyed a whole life black?