But I'll finish with this poem.
This will be the last one.
In January of 1991, I was honored
to have some poems published in a newspaper in El
Salvador called Diario Latino.
Diario Latino is an opposition newspaper.
It stands in opposition to the military, the death squads,
the government there responsible for the deaths
of tens of thousands of people over the last decade or so,
funded in large part by the United States,
sometimes to the tune of more than a million dollars a day.
So these are brave people, and I was
honored to have the poems appear in their newspaper.
A month later, in February of 1991,
Diario Latino was burned to the ground.
And everybody knew who did it.
Slowly, the newspaper began to rebuild, literally a page
at a time, until finally, a year later,
Diario Latino was back to full strength.
And in February of 1992, the first anniversary
of the fire, the following poem was published in Diario Latino.
It's a tribute to Diario Latino, of course,
and the people who work there.
Many of the details in the poem are taken from a letter
that I received from a friend of mine down in El Salvador.
And yet, the poem goes beyond that.
It's also a tribute to people anywhere
who have the courage to speak, and whose voices
rise above the flames.
The poem is called "When Songs Become Water"
for Diario Latino, El Salvador, 1991.
"Where dubbed commercials sell the tobacco and alcohol
of a far winter metropolis, where the lungs of night
cough artillery shots into the ears of sleep,
where strikers with howls stiff on their faces and warnings
pinned to their shirts are harvested from garbage heaps,
where olive uniforms keep watch over the plaza
from a nest of rifle eyes and sandbags,
where the government party campaigns,
chanting through loudspeakers that this country will
be the burial ground of the reds,
there, the newsprint of mutiny is
as medicine on the fingertips.
And the beat of the press-printing mutiny
is like the pounding of tortillas in the hands.
When the beat of the press is like the pounding of tortillas,
and the newsprint is medicine on the fingertips,
come the men with faces wiped away
by the hood, who smother the mouth of witness night,
shaking the gasoline can across the floor,
then scattering in a dark orange eruption of windows,
leaving the paper to wrinkle, gray in the heat.
Where the faces wiped away by the hood are known
by the breath of gasoline on their clothes,
and paper wrinkles gray as the skin of incarcerated talkers,
another army helicopter plunges from the sky
with blades burning like the wings of a gargoyle.
The tortilla and medicine words are smuggled in shawls.
The newspapers are hoarded like bundles of letters
from the missing.
The poems become songs, and the songs become water streaming
through the arteries of the Earth, where others at the well
will cool the sweat in their hair, and begin to think."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]