<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Meetings<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong>In memoriam Kurt Waldheim*<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Small world, what, Excellency? We shall not shake hands.<\/p>\n I do not care how you manage to live with the murder of children<\/p>\n among the conquered women and spoilt vineyards and olivegroves<\/p>\n back in the Balkans, back in your youth: that is your affair.<\/p>\n But what you have done, to me and my world, that\u2019s mine.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n At last, our final meeting. You were an obedient officer<\/p>\n ordered to make a corpse of me,\u00a0 perforce a small one.<\/p>\n I have survived the mayhem to make a poem of you.<\/p>\n I am more generous than you and far more consistent.<\/p>\n Old soldiers like you in public life can still be of use.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Admit the past for the sake of the future, and go in peace<\/p>\n at the mercy of your smouldering, sordid, meandering memories.<\/p>\n Or dare to persist in denying the truth and the value of life,<\/p>\n pretend that nothing occurred to stir your attention,<\/p>\n and I promise you will never escape the stench of corpses:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n for I will record your name as well as the crimes<\/p>\n from which you say you averted your indifferent eyes,<\/p>\n in tales of horror to be recounted throughout the ages<\/p>\n till the end of the march of innocent future generations<\/p>\n to weigh up anew, again and again, and recoil from your life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thomas Orsz\u00e1g-Land<\/strong> a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. His books include eight collections of verse in many editions.\u00a0 The Survivors: Holocaust Poetry for Our Time<\/em>, will be published by Smokestack in 2014.<\/p>\n *Kurt Waldheim, (1918-2007), former president of Austria, secretary-general of the United Nations\u00a0 and\u00a0 intelligence officer of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, who died peacefully days after publicly repenting his silence over the atrocities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meetings In memoriam Kurt Waldheim* Small world, what, Excellency? We shall not shake hands. I do not care how you manage to live with the murder of children among the conquered women and spoilt vineyards and olivegroves back in the Balkans, back in your youth: that is your affair. But what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4217"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4219,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4217\/revisions\/4219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}