Tortures
Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and
sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just
beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and
fingernails;
its bones can be broken; it’s joints can
be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.
Nothing has changed.
They body still trembles as it trembled
before
in the twentieth century before and
after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were,
only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s
just a room away.
Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside
the old ones –
real, make-believe, short-lived and
nonexistent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and
pitch.
Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners,
ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writes, jerks and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up
its knees,
bruises,
swells, drools and bleeds.
Nothing has changed.
Except the run of the rivers,
the shape of forests, shores, deserts,
and glaciers.
The little soul roams among those landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own
existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.
Wisława Szymborska
(from The People on the Bridge 1986)