IX Love Poem
The ones who widened the Panama Canal
(and were put on the silver roll and not on the gold roll),
the ones who repaired the Pacific fleet
at the military bases in California,
the ones who rotted in jail in Guatemala,
Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua
for being thieves, smugglers, scammers,
for being hungry,
the ever-suspicious ones
(‘I bring forth this individual
arrested for being a suspicious bystander
with the aggravation of being Salvadorian’),
the ones who filled the bars and brothels
of all the ports and capitals in the region
(The blue cave, The panty, Happyland),
the ones who grew corn in foreign jungles,
the kings of the crime section,
the ones who no-one ever knows where they’re from,
the best craftsmen in the world,
the ones who were mowed down with bullets while crossing
the border,
the ones who died from malaria
or scorpion or snake bites
in banana plantation hell,
the ones who cried drunk for the national anthem
under cyclones in the Pacific or snow in the north,
the freeloaders, the beggars, the potheads,
Salvadorian sons of bitches,
the ones who barely made it back,
the ones who were a bit luckier,
the eternal illegals,
make-all, sell-all, eat-all,
the first to pull out a knife,
the saddest sad people in the world,
my countrymen,
my brothers.
This from Cordite Poetry Review:
Continue READING:As far as tragic poets’ stories go, Roque Dalton’s (El Salvador, 1935-1975) is perhaps the most tragic in Central America. In the 1950s as a Law student, he was the brightest of a literary movement which is now referred to as the Committed Generation, a group of militant leftist writers who saw art as a revolutionary act. ‘Commitment’ meant joining the cause of a communist revolution. Since any kind of dissent had been outlawed by military dictatorships in El Salvador since the 1930s, signing up to such an endeavour led to prison, exile or death.
Dalton embodied the movement’s spirit of radical, experimental and bohemian writing – he is equally known for weaving uncompromising leftist politics into avant-garde free verse as he is for a life of drink and escapades in various soviet-aligned countries. He called some of his collections ‘literary collages’, by which he meant a combination of found poems (historical documents, news, old poems, etc) and his own poetry around a theme, whether it was Communism in Latin America, the history of El Salvador or life in exile.
With a conversational style that reneged of the overly poetic (Dalton claimed to have ‘nothing to do with the Neruda family’) he borrowed from Salvadorian slang and celebrated a devious way of life with a brash sense of humour. His poems, though sometimes dated for the references to communism and revolution, still resonate with a common Latin American experience: a history of corrupt governments kept in power by a small group of wealthy families or the U.S. with the complacency of subservient middle classes and ineffective bureaucrats. Names of presidents and generals he mentions only need to be changed to current ones.
In Roque Dalton’s world reality in El Salvador was so mad that your options were to laugh or join the revolution. Or both. Dalton joined the People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo or ERP), one of five clandestine groups that eventually formed the FMLN guerrilla in the 1980s, now the political party in government. The ERP was regarded as the most extreme faction of El Salvador’s left wing movement.
The tragedy of Dalton came abruptly in 1975, when, after returning to El Salvador after years of exile or jail, he was murdered by his own comrades who accused him of being a CIA agent. The circumstances of his killing are sketchy due to the secretive internal workings of the ERP and the fact that his alleged killers, (the ERP leaders) have never stood trial.
