Guantanamo

It's becoming a magic word:
GUANTANAMO

it dispels the new western world
with its progress and civilization,
the victory of minimal human rights,
the America where free-thinkers
had grown quite comfortable
suggesting how the world
might be made a better place,
though their ideas might contradict
the majority and the authorities

Revelation by revelation,
we've come to realize that those
at the very top of our government
knew they held hundreds of innocent foreigners
and did nothing while sadistic soldiers
tortured them physically and spiritually for years
(frost-biting their feet and sodomizing them with mop handles,)
mostly just for fun

And now,
without punishment for these crimes,
it seems our nation'll just walk on
quietly acknowledge a sliver of it,
pretty much censor the rest,
and look to the future

But free-thinkers don't see that future
in the TV news way:
we'll watch our words
stay out of the spot-light,
perhaps stop worrying so much
about the good of society or "the people,"
most of whom would just look the other way
were we to just disappear

Yes, it's a magic incantation:
"GUANTANAMO"
it summons back the old world:
the S.S. and the smoke-stacks,
Siberian prison camps and "re-education,"
countless U.S. POWs being worked to death
watched over by cruel Japanese guards,
the demagoguery of McCarthy
pushing us toward nuclear apocalypse

Just say the word
and you can hear the London air-raid sirens,
the foul roars of "Heil Hitler" from Nazi parades,
the howls of animals in the Roman Colliseum,
the scream of Christopher Marlowe
as he was murdered for open atheism,
the screams of Birmingham children
as they were torn into by police dogs

Things had been getting better:
Stalin and Chairman Mao died,
the cold war was navigated and passed,
people learned they could say "no"
to the needless Vietnam War,
Europe ressurected
like a phoenix from war's ashes,
and outright sinister evil seemed
all but gone from the world

And then in the heart of America,
as if through a time machine,
there came a draconian monster:

!!GUANTANAMO!!