Trial Run
Radovan Karadzic
has caused The Hague a tiny hitch:
he won't be tried for genocide
until he's well-prepared.
Why should he face the music
when his many victims line a ditch,
and strike the kind of pose that shows
they really can't have cared?
Radovan, a mortal man,
needs nine months to concoct his plan -
a rousing speech, which may beseech
the world to seem less shocked:
Why should he wear the dunce's cap,
when he is in denial?
Whose eyes well up with bloody suds?
Some dead men? It's a trial.
To rub a man out, limb by limb,
needs effort and expense. It's grim
to think that Radovan must plan
his very own defence.
You'd think the rows of broken bone
half-hidden in the silt
could not by any stretch be shown
as evidence of guilt.
Give the man a year or three
to write the poetry of death,
and leave the cleansing cemetery
to suffocate the breath
of all the men found chained and shot
and women stripped of thought.
Did Radovan …? Or did he not?
Pray silence in the court.
