When the moment came,
I found I had to carefully unbind my fingers
from the cynicism to which they clung,
had to check hard the impulse to ridicule my own misting eyes.

That part of me was sure he would be shot,
sure that the moment itself
was some sort of farce, was impossible,
would be taken from me.

But a poet read a poem, if badly,
in a moment of honor, and no-one was shot.
(Yet I still can't shake that eight-year habit
of recoiling from impending doom.)

And he can't change everything.
I know that. But he said torture, and
condemned it, and that's worth something.
Even if by now the hope doesn't come naturally,

it still comes. That's worth something.