Juan Daniel Perotta

Life and Death

I write and take communion
— I break the bread
and drink wine —
I promise myself to forget
and not to plan
To live the eternal present
Sometimes I believe that this creation
is a wide bed
— god’s supreme coitus
supporting the world
and giving birth to his only-begotten child
etcetera —
For some people I would deserve the excommunion
but nothing is so important
I am not important
you are not important
If you disappeared today
the world would not mutate
Marcelo Gelman disappeared
and I am still alive
They killed Charles Horman
and I am still alive
People keep disappearing
and I am still alive
bush kills with impunity
and
I live
Perhaps death does not exist for God
Perhaps it does not exist for us either
perhaps we are god

Claribel Alegría

I’ve been a very close friend of Gelman for many years and I admire him greatly.  I am sending you a very short poem that I dedicated to him many years ago, when he was looking for the remnants of his dead son.

          Attachment
                   to Juan Gelman

Because I learned to love myself
I bleed
with your wounds

          — tr. Paul Pines

Efraín Bartolomé

At the Hall of the Red Tlalocs ¹
          for Guadalupe Belmontes Stringel  ²

1.

I stroll the courtyards of Tepantitla
like the barefoot kinsman walking the ancient roads
with lightest tread
for fear of causing hurt

The same sunbeam now asleep on the ground
could regret the heaviness of my step

Or the dust    the red molecules    the mortar    the
thoughtful rock

My wife
with unerring eye
takes note of the final details
of this crime:
reads the remains of paradise on the wall
remnants of the wise tree
that once gave light
and shadow
in this wasteland

In the outside air    riddled
Little butterflies fluttering in slow flight

—————————————————————————

¹  Minor rain gods, children and brothers of the great Aztec god of the rain and fertility.

²  The poet’s archeologist wife.

2.

Distant audible voices    echoes    aggressive motors

Ants gush from the tezontle  ¹

Grass is growing on the roofs

Suddenly nothing:
bursts of intense silence

I look again at the wail:
What a small dwelling for so much grandeur to inhabit

There remains but
a fragment of glory

The rest
is burning in the aggrieved air of the delicate afternoon

It is all yours    Senoñra
Have it

You know what you give to us and what you take from us

This stifled cry remains lying at your feet.

— tr. Asa Zatz

—————————————————————————

¹  Red lava used as building material to this day.

Sam Hamill

Elegy for Old Masters

Suddenly old and once again sleepless,
I rise in the night and slip outside
and climb the steep narrow steps to my terrace
to gaze up again at the southern skies.
I’ve learned to find the Southern Cross
and the Three Marias, but all the rest
remain a distant bafflement of barely dancing lights
on a moonless night in Buenós Aires.

Those who loved and taught me long ago,
those who spoke of solidarity and struggle,
are mostly dead and gone, their bodies
burned or buried — sad-eyed Rexroth,
who loved wandering in the mountains,
became a mountain; Levertov, my dear Denise,
who often spoke of revolutionary love,
is another faint light in the heavens;

Tom McGrath, who grinned and said his poems
were either tactical or strategic, raised
his weary voice and head in wild Irish joy
even as he lay dying in his hospital bed;
and brother Carruth, so troubled in his long life,
found serenity in the end through poems
for his beautiful wife and proclaimed with a laugh
that he was becoming the Dalai Lama.

These skies are a little brighter tonight
because they trod this battered earth and felt
the sufferings and modest joys of others
and turned their full heart-songs against
the killing machine that is our nation.

But where are our revolutionary poets
today?  Poetry’s become a minor industry,
literature a business run by bureaucrats.

Every poet is a teacher, technique the winery sea
in which ideas drown.  Who shall please
the Guggenheims, the Lanais and MacArthurs
and suddenly be declared a genius?
Money and ambition are poisons in the well
at which true Muses drink.  Poetry becomes
a commodity peddled by the well-fed dogs
of corporate duplicity.  No one makes a sacrifice.

I long to hear once more old Etheridge
say a poem, grin, and break into a chorus
of “Willow Weep for Me,” and tell my prison class,
“Write only that one poem you would die for,
the poem that frees you from your chains,
and learn to love not the song, but the singing.”
I would die to hear June Jordan’s cancer-stricken voice
ask me again to publish her Collected Poems.

We were warriors for peace in a world of wars
that never ended, wars against the poor, against women,
wars for bananas, sugar, copper, gold, silver, oil.
I learned democracy from the noble Iroquois,
and walked the sacred path of the Navajo, the Hopi
whose history has been erased along with their faces,
names, and holy places.  Viva Zapatistas!
Whatever our crimes, we did not rent or sell our souls.

Now, toward dawn, I think of those whom I so loved
on this long wakeful night alone, my journey
almost over.  High overhead, the mysterious stars
pass by in silence.  A soft wind rustles the leaves
of trees along Calle Gorritti.  I go back down the steps
and into the house, pour my wine and raise my toast:
Salutations! old friends, my guiding lights.  It is
almost the end of night, almost time for me to sleep.