You called me: Evil Empire.
It was partly through your expertise
in name-calling that you overcame me.

I was an archipelago within a fortress.
I was a state within a prison.
I was the remote Tartar city at which the prisoners
on the Eastbound trains were unchained,
rationally, since beyond that point
there was nowhere to escape to
and the chains were sorely needed back West.

In those days the frenzy of my purges
and the torpor of my bureaucracy sometimes cancelled out,
a cellist released before interrogation
because the interrogator had himself been taken.

I taught that my victory was inevitable,
that the Slow War was my patient way
of placing the entire planet under arrest.

You won that war but the spirit of the conquered
seeps into the conqueror.
The Norman invader becomes a fastidious Englishman;
the brutal Ostrogoth, an Italian fop.

And so the 3 a.m. knock is heard again,
this time, as planned, inevitably,
across the housing estates of Western Europe.
The extraordinary renditions have just begun.
Those suspected of contacts with atrocitists
are removed by non-existent persons
to non-existent places.
Your hard-won oil is oiling the locks
at my old camps, at the Black Sites.

I am yours now.
Our great days are ahead.

© 2007

See also:
News item about a black site in Poland
Poetry anthology for the Red Cross including this poem