"Do not feel safe." A Poem a Day to Celebrate National Poetry Month

Another lovely April day brings another poem to celebrate National Poetry Month! This one is quite "heavy" and I think it's amazing how beautifully written it is, as well as how vivid and chilling the last two lines are. I got goosebumps the first time I read this poem. 

You Who Wronged by Czesław Miłosz

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.

R
Submitted by Redding, CT

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