Nothing has changed. <br />The body is susceptible to pain, <br />it must eat and breathe air and sleep, <br />it has thin skin and blood right underneath, <br />an adequate stock of teeth and nails, <br />its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable. <br />In tortures all this is taken into account. <br /> <br />Nothing has changed. <br />The body shudders as it shuddered <br />before the founding of Rome and after, <br />in the twentieth century before and after Christ. <br />Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller, <br />and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall. <br /> <br />Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people, <br />besides the old offenses new ones have appeared, <br />real, imaginary, temporary, and none, <br />but the howl with which the body responds to them, <br />was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence <br />according to the time-honored scale and tonality. <br /> <br />Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances. <br />Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same. <br />The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away, <br />its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up, <br />it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds. <br /> <br />Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries, <br />the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers. <br />Amid these landscapes traipses the soul, <br />disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away, <br />alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, <br />while the body is and is and is <br />and has no place of its own. <br /> <br /> <br />Anonymous submission.<br /><br />Wislawa Szymborska<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tortures/
