[Andrew Frisardi]

I agree that this poem is mind-blowingly effective. Its technique is masterly but unobtrusive--technical bravado that called too much attention to itself wouldn't fit theme. The plainspokenness of it verges on the journalistic, eerily and effectively jarring with the biblical imagery. The use of the word disappeared three times in the poem (two times as a passive "were disappeared" once as a noun, "the disappeared"), echoing the Generalissimo's Orwellian doublespeak, is the dark that sets off or is set off by the light of the resurrection language--finally resolved in that final dark line, where the arms of grace or consecration are bound by wire. A subtext is that in the Christian story no one knows where Jesus' body has gone, after they find the tomb empty; he's one of the "disappeared." When he does appear, his arms and hands are very important, since by handing out food to the Apostles they bear witness to the resurrection. Here, we're left with a question mark--will the arms stay bound, the way the General wants it, or not?

Coming back to add in: Another theme of this poem, explicitly so, given the epigraph, is the telling of truth versus the telling of lies, or facing the truth versus denying it. I recently read a book about the massacre in Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1995--and other massacres during the Bosnian War--and one of the book's main themes was how, in the war crimes trials after, and in the telling of what happened, how even the most undeniable truths were in fact routinely, brazenly denied. In this poem, truth telling is implicitly associated with resurrection, and that is why the General wants the listener to believe the arms will stay bound--to keep the truth from surfacing. All of this obvious enough but for me it goes to show how much thought is going on in these fourteen lines.