This is not paella.
This is what has become of those who remain in Buenos Aires.
This is the ring of a rifle report on the stones,
her hand over her mouth, her husband falling against her.
These are the flowers we bought this morning,
the dahlias tossed on his grave and bells
waiting with their tongues cut out
for this particular silence."
In the autumn, I returned to San Diego.
And I don't know whether to tell the long, the short,
or the very, very shortest version of this story.
But ultimately, I was asked by relatives of Claribel Alegria
to spend my Guggenheim year in El Salvador
rather than do what my friends said.
They said, you have a Guggenheim.
You should go to Paris and write poetry, or at least
New England.
So I didn't.
None of them supported my decision to go to El Salvador.
But it was said to me that I should spend the year there.
And I would work, going from one to another, first
at a rural clinic, and then in a little village.
And I would work beside different people
with different occupations.
And that was told to me that they wanted me to do this
because I was a poet.
And they told me in 1977 that in three to five years,
their country was going to be the beginning of my country's
next Vietnam.
And they asked me if I wanted to see it from the beginning,
from the inside.
And because of the time in which I grew up, of course
I wanted to understand that.
But I didn't quite believe that those things
would come to pass.
And I said, well, what would you like me to do?
And they said, nothing.
We want you to learn as much as you can.
And then you can go back to the United States.
And when the war starts, you can explain it to the Americans
why we are fighting.
And I said, you don't understand something.
I said, in the United States, poets are considered flaky.
And we won't have--
I said, I can't go and explain it to the Americans.
He said, change that.
So I don't know.
I stayed two years and, in that period of time,
began working for--
as a woman named Luisa--
for human rights organizations and ultimately for Monsignor
Romero and others in the country and had
to leave March 16, 1980.
Well, one of this--
I'm going to read you a few poems now
and little excerpts of prose from that period.
And the first one is called, "The Visitor."
I was inside a prison called Awa, Japan.
I was inside for 30 minutes.
And I was shown inside Awa, Japan
six wooden boxes, one stacked up on top of the other,
three across.
And these boxes were small, about a meter
by a meter by a meter, like a small washing
machine or something.
And they were each padlocked.
And they had openings in them about the size
of a book with chicken wire mesh over the openings.
And in the darkness and stench of that room,
I could see the boxes moving and sounds
coming from within the boxes.
And one of the prisoners said to me,
that's called la oscura the darkness, solitary.
Sometimes men are kept in there one year
and can't move when they come out
because of the atrophy in their muscles,
because they can't stand up or lie down or sit up straight.
This is a poem I wrote for the prisoner who
gave me the information inside.
"In Spanish he whispers there is no time left.
It is the sound of scythes arcing
in wheat, the ache of some field song in Salvador.
The wind along the prison, cautious as Francisco's hands
on the inside, touching the walls as he walks.
It is his wife's breath slipping into his cell
each night while he imagines his hand to be hers.
It is a small country.
There is nothing one man will not do to another."