Guatemala

VIOLETA GARCÍA-MENDOZA

This is not a poem about volcanoes.
This is not the poem where you go
into the dense jungle, see the clearing,
the ruins rising before you.
This is not the poem featuring the quetzal
feather at your feet; the epiphany.

This is not even the poem in which
in the towns that the roads run to
you take photos outside the yellow church,
in the park. This is not the poem of you
contemplating yourself among ancient
wood, iron, water. Laughing,
making friends on a chicken bus.

This is the poem you don’t want
to keep reading. The one in which
women are raped, where their fathers
and brothers and husbands and sons
are murdered, mutilated, displayed.
The one in which the villains win,
burn half the village alive—a cloud
between those beating mountains.

In this poem, it’s not “to disappear”
but “to be disappeared.”
Everyone you meet has been betrayed.

Enough of generalizations. Fact:
in this poem, a girl—seven years old,
eyes like dark stars—goes on an errand
to buy milk for her brother.
On the way she is abducted—
imagine unspeakable things—
in a fetid room, she is beheaded.
She was good and worthy
as your own child, or your neighbor’s. 

Let it fill you with terror,
the thick, deliberate hate of this act.
The girl’s mother and father might want you
to read that stanza again, in remembrance of her.

This is the poem in which disbelief,
that mosquito netting around you,
accomplishes nothing. Nothing.
This is the poem you never wanted to carry.

Now, walk.

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