The Documentary

The peasants would not be photographed, they said,
in rags and crucifixes; they didn’t want
to change out of their jeans and tennis shoes,
and refused to hold their pitchforks at an angle
more suitable for filming. The slaughterhouse
didn’t look half as picturesque up close—
the wooden slats weren’t all that rotted, really,
and the blood that slowly seeped into the grass
seemed a much richer red from far away.
Besides, groaned the director, what’s the point
if you can’t even get the smell across?
He’d hoped this film would be his magnum opus,
the flourishing coda to a long career
of chasing down the truth wherever it went:
the slums, the steppes, the killing fields, the Arctic,
and now—at last—the village of his birth.
Of all the tragedies that had befallen
this village over the past eighty years
(famines, partitions, the odd genocide),
none was so great, he said on TV later,
as the new motorway that marred the view.

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