Hotel Terminus

Whilst the office bustles away in the background, they
are doing torture practice at the Hotel Terminus.
Under the water in the ornate bathtub,
swallowing and suffocating; a man.
A random civilian, who ought to know something interesting.
Above him, the pole and hands in a grey fog.
His lungs are furnaces, muffled and blazing,
a ship foundering in a storm, turbines roaring, going down, fading.
Then winched up into the arms of the gestapo instructor,
his all but tender tutelage, his nightmare care.
Cradling his limp subject like a nurse,
kissing him back into consciousness,
trying to prise the information out of pallid lips.
Tell us where, who, how many goals did he score?
He’s whispering questions that cannot be answered.
Down he goes again. Air! Air! A semaphore of bubbles,
feet slip in panic on the unyielding ceramic. Finally he is hung up to die,
naked over the bathtub while the secretary types,
and people tell jokes,
and someone smokes and munches on a sandwich,
and someone else looks passively out of the window.

He carried our sorrows. It is not the Jews
alone, Lord Jesus, that had you crucified;
betraying you, dragging you to the court,
hating your guts, spitting in your face,
binding you, tattooing you with bruises.
Nor only the soldiers
who with their ready fists
raised the reed, lifted the hammer high,
fixed the cursed wood at the place of the skull
and squabbled, dicing for your coat.

It's me, my God, me who did this to you.
I am the heavy tree that bore you down,
the cord that cut you mercilessly. Me.
The nail and spear. The whip they slashed you with.
The crown of blood you wore upon your brow.
Oh, all this happened on account of my own sin.

Jacobus Revius (1586-1658) (translated from the dutch)