The Disappeared
From The Chrysalis, page 10
ISBN 1-931002-11-8
Petaluma, 2001
He wrote of potatoes
as earthy testes: Neruda,
who knew the masses South America has
down there…
Large as ankles in dark, dank clamps;
nosing rows of purple and yellow
‘thumbs’ ‘penises’ ‘ears’,
breaking the earth like bread, each good year.
1973: Off with its head.
The junta smashes his library
on Isla Negra.
The football stadium with ten thousand children stopped screaming
when Victor Jarra played la guitarra after they took off his hands
and still sang, briefly.
In 1986, out in the country,
a hand-written notice in the local post office
in Olema. It looked like a poem, someone
was ‘…pleased to announce’
a pale-gold birth: ‘Spuds for sale.’
Which brought him up.
Always hungry for words
that taste of the earth.
A decade later, in Chile
and Argentina, we learned the dead rise.
(Maybe here, one day, the ground beneath our feet
will be taken away and returned)
Brushing the dirt from their eyes
tenderly, forensically, their children harvest the facts
of life when poetry is put to the axe.
The broken
teeth, smashed cheeks, the last gasps
of disbelief.
One day Kissinger will be taken to the Hague.