SocialistStories حكايات اشتراكية

The Cops and the Guards
by Roque Dalton

They always saw the people
as a mass of backs running away
as a field on which their clubs fell with hatred.

They always saw the people with an eye on sharpening their
aim
and between the people and their eye
the sight of a pistol or a rifle.

(They too were once people
but with the excuse of hunger and unemployment
they accepted a weapon a club and a monthly salary
to defend the makers of hunger and unemployment.)

They always saw the people enduring
sweating
shouting
raising placards

Ways of Dying
by Roque Dalton

Commander Ernesto Che Guevara,
called "the great adventurer of armed struggle"
by pacifists
went and applied his revolutionary concepts
in Bolivia.
In the act he lost his life and those of a handful of heroes.

The great pacifists of the prudent path
tried out their own concepts in Chile:
the dead now exceed 30 thousand.

Imagine, reader, what they'd tell us
if they could speak of their experience,
those dead in the name of each concept.

Liberation:

Ways of Dying - Roque Dalton.pdf