Hayden Carruth
The Event Itself
A curious reticence afflicts my generation, faced with the holocaust;
We speak seldom of the event itself, but only of what will be lost;
We, having betrayed our fathers and all our silent grandfathers, cannot cry out for ourselves,
the present and tempest-tossed.
But many things and all manner of things will be hurled
In a force like dawnlight breaking, and the billion bagpipes of our screams will be skirled
Stupendously month after month, the greatest pain ever known in the world.
There will be some instantly indistinguishable from the molten stone;
But most will have bleeding, burning, gangrene, the sticking-out bone;
Men, women, and little children will be made pregnant of the nipping crab whose seed will be
universally sown.
In the screaming and wallowing one thought will make each eye stare,
And that thought will be the silence pressing down at the end of the air,
Soon to smother the last scream forever and everywhere.
For the last man in the world, dying, will not know that he is the last,
But many will think it, dying; will think that in all the vast
And vacant universe they are the final consciousness, going out, going out, going out, with
nothing to know it has passed.
Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press, 1992.