Because of the way a name, any name,

Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

Sensationalism

THE ASSIMILATION OF THE GYPSIES

In the background, a few shacks & overturned carts

And a gray sky holding the singular pallor of Lent.

And here the crowd of onlookers, though a few of them

Must be intimate with the victim,

Have been advised to keep their distance.

The young man walking alone in handcuffs that join

Each wrist in something that is not prayer, although

It is as urgent, wears

A brown tweed coat flecked with white, a white shirt

Open at the collar.

And beside him, the broad, curving tracks of a bus that

Passed earlier through the thawing mud…they seem

To lead him out of the photograph&toward

What I imagine is

The firing squad: a few distant cousins & neighbors

Assembled by order of the State—beside

The wall of a closed schoolhouse.

Two of the men uneasily holding rifles, a barber

And an unemployed postal clerk,

Are thinking of nothing except perhaps the first snowfall

Last year in the village, how it covered & simplified

Everything—the ruts in the road & the distant

Stubble in the fields—& of how they cannot be,

Now, any part of that. Still,

They understand well enough why

The man murdered the girl's uncle with an axe,

Just as they know why his language,

Because it was not official & had to be translated

Into Czech at the trial, failed to convince

Anyone of its passion. And if

The red-faced uncle kept threatening the girl

Until she at last succumbed under a browning hedge, & if

The young man had to use three strokes with the axe

To finish the job—well, they shrug,

All he had, that day, was an axe.

And besides, the barber & the clerk suspect that this boy,

Whom they have known for half their lives,

Had really intended to kill the girl that evening—

Never the uncle.

In a lost culture of fortune tellers, unemployable

Horse traders, & a frank beauty the world

Will not allow,

It was the time of such things, it was late summer,

And it is time now, the two executioners agree,

That all of this ended. This is

Jarabina. 1963. And if

Koudelka tells us nothing else about this scene,

I think he is right, if only because

The young man walks outside time now, & is not

So much a murderer as he is, simply, a man

About to be executed by his neighbors….

And so it is important to all of them that he behave

With a certain tact & dignity as he walks

Of his own accord but with shoulders hunched,

Up to the wall of the empty schoolhouse;

And, turning his head

First to one side, then to the other,

He lets them slip the blindfold over his eyes

And secure it with an old gentleness

They have shared

Since birth. And perhaps at this moment

All three of them remember slipping light scarves,

Fashioned into halters,