Due Process
Mar 5 2010

No babies
torn from mothers’ arms.
No one beaten, tortured
shot point-blank.

It was orderly queues.
Prim officials
uniformed, meticulous.
Forms in triplicate
signed and stamped.

We felt reassured
— a civilized people
a legal plan.
So they took away our valuables
our homes,
left only each other
hope
the clothes on our backs.

We assembled in well-mannered lines,
straggling into draughty box-cars
tightly-packed,
stinking of wet wool
and human bodies.
With a single bucket in an open corner
sloshing onto the floor.
We let them lead us on,
too familiar with due process, order,
anaesthetized
by our refusal to believe
in evil.

Totalitarian regimes
are brilliant at bureaucratic legalese.
Over-compensating, perhaps
for their depravity
their complicity
— just following orders
saving themselves.
So what satisfying irony
that they so meticulously documented their crimes
for posterity,
in gun-metal boxes, on yellowing pages
neatly filed and signed.
In hand
by name and rank.

If we hadn’t been so civilized
we might have broken from line
escaped.
But we meekly obeyed, took our place
in the warm bath
of order, authority.
Only to be boiled alive.


Hardly my usual poem: not the typical lyric poem, inspired by nature; nothing small and personal about it. This one is political, polemical, and ambitious – things I try hard to avoid. But I felt like saying it; which, I guess, is a good enough reason for any poem.

Actually, what set me off was the movie Defiance: I thought the scene of rounding up the Jews was unrealistic. The Germans believed too much in order and due process, in their own superior civilized sensibilities, for such unsavoury bullying. (Although, to be fair to the film, perhaps their Byelorussian henchmen weren’t quite so scrupulous.) But more than that, I thought the contrast between the inhuman and brutal outcome and a sanitized legalistic process would be far more effective, far more chilling; even if it is less obvious and less explicitly dramatic. I’m especially thinking of the Dutch Jews and their collaborator countrymen: the habit of compliance (so very Dutch!); the denial of the existence of death camps; the belief in a civilized Europe.

It’s not by any means a great poem; certain not in terms of style or artfulness. (Which is usually what I’m most interested in.) In fact, the day after it was written I was going to delete the rough draft. But, as I said, it was something I felt like saying …and still do. Anyway, as anyone who knows me will attest, I’m far too frugal to ever throw anything away!

The ending refers, of course, to the famous frog experiment (which, for all I known, may be entirely apocryphal.) This is the supposed experiment in which a frog, tossed into boiling water, immediately leaps out. But if placed in a warm comfortable bath, remains: even as the heat is slowly turned up, until the frog is boiled alive.