Empty Daybook – Joaquín Orellana Mejía on 26 April 1998

Bishop Juan Gerardi was murdered on April 26, 1998, in reaction to a report presented by his project Recuperación de la memoria histórica (REHMI – Recovery of historical memory). The killing provoked a strong impact in my personal realm of social sensitivity. It was a sordid and brutal event, condemned internationally as one of the most atrocious actions of the counterinsurgency of Guatemala’s Civil War.

One thought on “Empty Daybook – Joaquín Orellana Mejía on 26 April 1998

  1. Rick Livingston

    Rusia en 1931 (Robert Hass)

    The archbishop of San Salvador is dead, murdered by no one knows

    Who. The left says the right, the right says provocateurs.

    But the families in the barrios sleep with their children beside them and

    A pitchfork, or a rifle if they have one.

    And posterity is grubbing in the footnotes to find out who the bishop is,

    Or waiting for the poet to get back to his business. Well there’s this:

    Her breasts are the color of brown stones in the moonlight, and paler in

    Moonlight.

    And that should hold them for a while. The bishop is dead. Poetry

    Proposes no solutions: it says justice is the well water of the city of

    Novgorod, black and sweet.

    Cesar Vallejo died on Thursday. It may have been malaria, no one

    Is sure; it burned through the small town of Santiago de Chuco in the

    Andean Valley of his childhood; it may have flared in his veins

    In Paris on a rainy day;

    And nine months later Osip Mandelstam was seen feeding off the

    Garbage heap of a transit camp near Vladivostok.

    They might have met in Leningrad in 1932, on a corner; two men about

    Forty; they could have compared gray hair at the temples, or compared

    Reviews of Trilce and Tristia in 1922.

    What French they would have spoken!

    And what the one thought would save Spain killed the other.

    “I am no wolf by blood,” Mandelstam wrote that year. “Only an equal

    could break me.”

    And Vallejo: “Think of the unemployed. Think of the forty million

    families of the hungry…”

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