SocialistStories حكايات اشتراكية

Che 1997
by Mario Benedetti

They have covered him with posters / with placards
with voices on walls
with retroactive offenses
with honors that come too late

they have transformed him into a product
a trivial memory
a distant yesterday
a well-embalmed sense of rage

they have decided to use him as an epilogue
as the last gasp of useless innocence
as an aged archetype of a saint or satan

and perhaps they've discovered that the only way
to get rid of him
or let him fade away
is to suck the light out of him
make him into a marble

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