Sam Hamill

Southern Stars

It is solstice, the beginning
of summer, and almost New Year.
I’m watching Esteban measure out
each small shovelful of coals on his parrilla
where a rump roast slowly simmers.
From this third floor terrace,
we watch Venus, the first
and brightest evening star, emerge
above the Belgrano skyline.

We have been discussing
Galeano and “historical amnesia” —
that of Esteban’s Argentina
and that of my homeland.

A quarter century after the Dirty War,
many of the dictator’s hatchet-men
are still awaiting trial.

What became of Julio Simón —
the infamous Julián the Turk —
torturer and killer who threw
his screaming victims
out of airplanes high above
the Atlantic, bragging,
“I did it for mi patria, for
my faith, and for my religion.
Of course I would do it all again.”

Whatever became of Adolfo
Francisco Scilingo and his boss,
Vice Admiral Mendía, who told him
their victims “would fly,” and
assured him, “ecclesiastical authorities
proclaimed it a Christian,
nonviolent death” for those
accused of crimes against the State.
Scilingo confessed,
“Two thousand political prisoners learned to fly”
into the arms of God’s embrace.

No one knows the names of all the lost,
children stripped from mothers’ arms
in prison camps and sent away.
Today marks sixteen hundred
consecutive weeks the Mothers
of the Plaza have met and marched
from the Plaza de Mayo
to the Obelisk.  Where are their children
today?  Their sons, husbands, grandchildren,
the children of their friends . . .
Who knows?  No one will say.

In El Norte, our victims are always
the other, the ones we know
the very least — Vietnamese farmers or
Cambodian peasants sprayed
with Agent Orange; the innocent
booksellers lining Mutanabbi Street
in Baghdad for a thousand years or more,
bombed into oblivion; the nameless,
numberless and faceless dead of war
lying in Latin American fields and streets
from a hundred American invasions
in a century of unmitigated greed.

No one reveals the whereabouts
of the Black Sites, Bush’s secret prisons.
And official smirking faces — Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeldt, Ashcroft and the rest
likewise have no apologies to make.
They are the policy experts who enjoy
great fame and fabulous prosperity.
Criminals are the authors of our history.
The worst of evils lies in their impunity.

Esteban jokes about the time
he was stopped on the street by police
and told to cut his hair and shave
or face stiff penalties.  We fill our glasses
with a dry Chablis from the vineyards
of Mendoza and prepare to eat
as our wives come laughing
from the kitchen down below,
relieved to find a cooling breeze.

We put aside all talk of war.
Nations, borders, eternal crimes
against poor, suffering humanity
all evaporate in summer heat
as our communal laughter
rises like a shining star,
shared by those who are still surprised
to be laughing at all, grateful,
overjoyed to be alive.

Ernesto Cardinal

Calls

You can take the call you’ve been waiting for.
The call that might tell you your number was the prize winner.
You answered the question on the radio. And you won
the sample jar of cream, the blender, you won
the trip to Hawaii.
But in spite of the blender that’s absolutely guaranteed
and the fantastic cream that makes your skin velvet-smooth
you commit suicide with barbiturates.
In spite of having won
or in spite of the radar
you board a Comet 4C
bound for Los Angeles, bound for Honolulu
which the RB-47 reconnaissance plane has since lost track of.
Or you keep waiting for a call that doesn’t come
waiting for the arrival of love in fresh makeup
and they did call you a long time ago
and got that wrong number. Or they are calling you on the phone
and calling and calling
and yes, that’s your number, but you’re not there
you’ve left home
and it’s the police to inform you
that your body has been identified at the station house.

— tr. Jonathan Cohen

Jorge Boccanera

Juan Gelman: The Music of Questions

Gelman’s poetic breathing has the music of questions.  The clincher “Qué cuestión!” (“What a Question!”) in one of his early poems sets the stage for the unexpected to coexist with the dawning of awareness.  That question, added to the list of questions to be resolved, is subject to cross-examination.  And since his first book, “Violín y otras cuestiones,” (Violin and Other Questions), he has done nothing but resort to questioning the imagination.  Such questions are his insistent obsession: love, the city, the struggle for dignity, poetic revelation, the infancy of things, exile.  Question marks are the teeth of a gear that relentlessly grinds and mixes those themes together.  The succession of questions obliterates the logical supports of the “singing mania,” and sets up a pendular movement, a counterpoint between assertions-that-question and questions- that-assert.  The hammering of the questions puts everything in doubt; blurs the edges of every theme, creating a feeling of emptiness.  And when it seems that the question has been formulated, another one arises.  This intermittent breathlessness adds a body-language to the discourse as if the body itself were also asking.  For Gelman, the relation between imagination and memory is so intense that it creates another memory; imagination is the tool he uses to interrogate past, present, and future.  When Gelman questions — said Julio Cortázar — “he is inciting us to turn more lucidly toward the past in order to be more lucid vis-à-vis the future.”  Those questions splinter certainties off the backside of things.

— tr. Asa Zatz