They got away with it.

Every damned last one of them.
The withered armed, pockmarked Georgian,
the Wagner fanatic who began dreaming
of murder while listening to the opera,
the big peasant from Hunan province,
the twin-loving Angel of Death,
and all the rest of them.
None of them is standing in front of
an ominous judgment seat,
cringing in dread and
panting in quick, shallow breaths
as an impossibly long
and vividly detailed
bill of particulars is read to them.
And none of them
is trembling at the thought
that the jury has been drawn
from the sewers of the Lubianka,
the ash pits of Treblinka,
the fertilizer of Szechwan province,
or the children of Block 10.
Death rescued them
from the trials,
the searing testimony,
the universal public damnation,
the dank prison cells,
and being hanged in civilian clothes
(the final humiliation) as the reporters
looked on.
I never bought the idea,
born in the revenge-filled minds
of bronze age shepherds,
of the place of eternal fire
and ceaseless suffering.
But in the absence of justice
on the terrestrial plane,
shouldn't there be at least
some place where these men finally
have to answer, have to be brought
to account,
have to be confronted,
have to be grabbed by the shirt
by angry, unstoppable hands,
made to see what they have done,
and where they are forced to repent,
down to their
last atom,
for everything?
No one deserves eternal torture,
not even them; their guilt
would be expiated long before
infinity had passed.
But no one deserves to escape
being forced to see the face
of every person whose
humanity they spat on.
There should at least be that.
There should at least be that.