Y!
Can Kill # Prophet
If %ey kill
me, I will be
resurrected in
%e people
- Oscar Romero
Laura Hopps
“%' ' # year %at ,awled refu+es depo-
jud+s who (are at # floor and %eir swollen
feet as files are (amped
wi% %eir destination” According to Catholic Relief Services,
over 700 Salvadorans leave El Salvador
to cross the border into the U.S. without
-Martín Espada, The Angels of Bread documents every day. Not all of these
people make it safely into the U.S.
Hundreds of people have died or have
been killed in the attempt to cross the
border. Many more are caught and
forced to return to El Salvador.
During the Salvadoran Civil War
(1980-1992), over 75,000 people
were killed, 8,000 “disappeared,”
and millions were displaced, accord-
ing to Oxfam. The United States
provided millions of dollars worth
of military aid to the Salvadoran
government, which perpetrated the
vast majority of human rights
abuses.
Today, El Salvador is the most vio-
lent country in Central America
due to state repression (including
continued activity of “death
squads,” or groups of plain clothed
military men sanctioned by the gov- CRS reports that over 18% of the Gross National
ernment to carry out assassinations Product of El Salvador comes from remittances,
and torture), gang violence, and money sent from (mostly undocumented) Salva-
intra-family violence. dorans living in the U.S.
“It ' not ju( %at some have every%ing and secure it in such a way %at no one can t!ch %em,
while # marginalized majo)ty *es of hun+r.” - Oscar Romero
“Y! may ,oot me wi% y!r words,
Y! may cut me
wi% y!r eyes,
Y! may kill me
“Me vida solo he
sido un poema de
wi% y!r
amor a Dios.”
- Oscar Romero
hatefulness,
But (ill,
I’ll )se”
like air,
- Maya An+l!, Still I R'e
“Brothers, you are killing your brothers
No soldier is obliged to obey a law
that is contrary to the law of God.
I beg you. I implore you. I command you
in the name of God
STOP THE REPRESSION!”
-Oscar Romero
City Psalm
The killings continue, each second “I was chained
pain and misfortune extend themselves with handcuffs
in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and the air to the pipe
standing up for
bears the dust of decaying hopes, nine days, and
yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged they wouldn’t let
pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers me sleep. They
would torture
raging, a parking lot painfully agleam me for hours,
in the May sun, I have seen then take me
not behind but within, within the back. If I tried
to lean on the
dull grief, blown grit, a gleam wall, they beat
as of dew, an abode of mercy, me up. If I tried
have heard not behind but within noise to whisper to
another prisoner,
a humming that drifted into a quiet smile. they beat me up.
Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise; I knew I was
(CISPES) dead from the
time they de-
tained me. I
not that the horror was not, not that killings did not continue, prayed for them
to kill me with a
not that I thought there was to be no more despair, clean shot in the
but that as if transparent all disclosed back of the
head.”
an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.
Carlos Mauricio
I saw paradise in the dust of the street.
-Denise Levertov
Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
-
-
Naomi Shihab Nye
“What you have heard is true
I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him.
The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.
Broken bottles
On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps
from a man's legs or
cut his
“Torture victims
are scarred for- hands to lace.
ever,” Carlos
Mauricio -Donna de Cesare
said,”most will
never speak about
it in their whole My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.
lives. I am one of
very few to speak The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
out and to try to
bring the people the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of
who did this to
justice” them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am
tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He swept the ears to the
floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said.
Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice.
Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.”
- Carolyn Forché, The Colonel
“Peace is not the silence of cemeteries”
- Oscar Romero
“.e cry for liberation
of # people '
a clamor %at
reaches up
to heaven,
and which
no one
can detain.”
-Oscar Romero
