You Who Wronged

A few days ago, in the context of the Iranian uprising, Andrew Sullivan pointed us towards this great poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

You Who Wronged

by Czeslaw Milosz
You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold medals in your honor,
Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

Washington, D.C., 1950

Translated by Richard Lourie