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.
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.
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But the families in the barrios sleep with their children beside them and
A pitchfork, or a rifle if they have one.
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And posterity is grubbing in the footnotes to find out who the bishop is,
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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.
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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.
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What French they would have spoken!
And what the one thought would save Spain killed the other.
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“I am no wolf by blood,” Mandelstam wrote that year. “Only an equal
could break me.”
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And Vallejo: “Think of the unemployed. Think of the forty million
families of the hungry…”