David Huerta: “Ayotzinapa,” Translation into English by Mark Weiss

[On September 23rd 43 students of the teacher's college in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, were detained by the police on the way to a protest, and handed over to a local drug cartel. They were tortured and killed, their bodies dismembered, dumped in a pit and incinerated. Mexico has been in turmoil since.  

David Huerta is one of Mexico's most important poets. This poem is his reaction. (m.w.)]

AYOTZINAPA 

We bite the shadow

And in the shadow
The dead appear
As lights and fruit
As beakers of blood
As rocks from the pit
As branches and leaves
Of tender viscera

The hands of the dead

Are drenched in anguish
And twisted gestures
In the shroud of the wind
They bring with them
An insatiable sorrow

This is the land of ditches

Ladies and gentlemen
The land of screams
The land of children in flame
The land of tortured women
The land that barely existed yesterday
And today where it was is forgotten

We are lost between puffs

Of hellish sulphur
And irresistable fires
Our eyes are open
And stuffed
With broken glass

We extend

Our living hands
To the dead and the disappeared
But they back away from us
With a gesture of infinite distance

The bread is burnt

The faces of life are uprooted
And burnt and there are no hands
Nor faces
Nor country

There's just a vibration

Thick with tears
A long howl
Where we have confused
The living with the dead

Whoever reads this must know

That they were cast into the sea of the smoke
Of cities
Like a sign of the broken spirit

Whoever reads this must also know

That in spite of all
The dead have neither gone
Nor been made to disappear

That the spell of the dead

Is in sunrise and spoon
In foot and cornfield
In sketches and river

We gave to this spell

The calm silver
Of the breeze

To our dead

To our youthful dead
We delivered the bread of the sky
The sprig of waters
The splendor of all sadness
The whiteness of our condemnation
The forgetting of the world
And the shattered memory
Of all that live

Now brothers

It's best to be silent
To open one's hands and mind
So as to harvest from the cursed land
The shards of hearts
Of all who are
And all
Who have been

David Huerta

November 2, 2014
Oaxaca 

[Originally published in Plume online at http://plumepoetry.com/2014/12/ayotzinapa/]