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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2006 : William Pitt Root
EL COMANDANTE HAS ASKED FOR A SONG
for Victor Jara and everyone who sang
Just after the 9/11/73 CIA coup toppled and murdered popularly elected Salvadore Allende in Chile, and shortly before fevers consumed Neruda and he died: "The body of Victor Jara, mutilated, how could you not know? Oh my God! If this is how they kill a songbird...and they say he sang and sang, which riled the soldiers..."
—from Mathilde Urrutia's My Life With Pablo Neruda
And the first time I hear you sing
what I'm not prepared for is the astonishingly
intricate tenderness of your voice
winding through your guitar strings
like roses breathing through barbed wire.
Nor, as I hear the guitar face resonate
and the gut strings ringing, still,
so many years after being struck,
have I any way
not to know
the agony on its way to your hands
not to see
your eyes raised to the blank gaze of the sun
where so many fellow prisoners in the stadium
watch as you evolve into a vision before them.
El Comandante has asked for a song.
He knew who you were.
He'd picked you out of the crowd
being herded by club and gun-butt.
El Comandante has asked for a song.
Declaring Allende, "that false savior," dead,
reporting Pinochet ruler from this day forth,
and noting that those present, even so,
seem fearful of what is to come,
El Comandante has asked for a song.
"And you, singer, aren't you the people's tongue?
Show me your hands, singer—
Aren't these the fingers that 'play
the hearts of the poor like angels'?"
Show me your hands.
And thus, slowly,
you hold up your hands before you:
the left
then right
hacked by the machete
And as your eyes blur
welling up
as if to blind you
to what's been done,
you still see
those fingers
curling on his table,
fingers mute as lost children.
And you see what is held up pulsing before you,
held up before El Comandante,
who is not satisfied, who is outraged by your composure
who falls upon you snarling,
"Sing now, motherfucker, sing!"
beating and
beating you, his hands knotted in their frenzy
while already the strings of your fingers are drawing tight—
each like a body freshly fallen on the beach,
each curled to protect the wound in the belly,
straining,
gradually going limp,
each surrendering its history of memories and skills.
And I know how you stood there after, holding up hands
overflowing like candelabrum
from which the candles have been seized,
from whose sockets red as pomegranate,
red as the parrot's heart,
thick wax pulses, translucent,
brimming, brimming
while your eyes widen & your throat first clutches
then suddenly, valve of your being, opens,
crying out to the thousands, calling for the song:
"Comrades, let us grant this one his wish!"
And in a voice that spurts like blood
you sing,
you strike one chord with jetting stubs
& you sing
& everyone sings,
the thousands imprisoned in the stadium all sing
the anthem of the Unidad Popular
Everyone, every one sang there under the blazing witness
until the machine guns
crazed by the contagion of your courage
maddened by the strength of your voices combining
did the only thing it is machine guns can do.
This poem won Second Prize in the 2006 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author William Pitt Root received a $500 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About William Pitt Root
William Root's poetry has received numerous honors, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia Magazine, the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, a Borestone Award, and several Pulitzer nominations. He has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Stanford University’s Stegner Writing Grant, a United States/United Kingdom Exchange Artist Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts writing grant.
Root's eleven published books include Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom (1994) and White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West (2006). His poems, stories and reviews have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harper's, Commonweal, APR, Poetry, Parabola, Ploughshares, Georgia Review and thedrunkenboat.com, and in numerous anthologies including Comeback Wolves (2005), Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains (2005), Homage to Vallejo (2005), Family Matters (2005), Noble as They Come: A Poetry of Horses (2005), Where We Live: The Northwest (2005), The New Yorker Book of Poetry, The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, The Morrow Book of Younger American Poets, The Lexington Guide to Literature, Strong Measures: 20th Century Poets in Traditional Forms, Crossing the River: New Poets of the American West and Poets of the Southwest.
After many years as a "coach-class jet-setter"—commuting bi-weekly between Tucson (where he was poet laureate 1997-2002) and Manhattan (where he taught writing and literature at Hunter College since 1986)—Root and his wife, poet Pamela Uschuk, have settled in Southwestern Colorado near the Weminuche Wildreness with a cadre of animal companions. When not writing, acting as poetry editor for Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, or traveling with Pamela to give readings/workshops (most recently in Prague, Durango and Capetown), Root enjoys hiking, kayaking, canoeing or just heading off for the backcountry with his white wolfdog Happy and an old SLR Nikon in his even older Land Cruiser. Poetry, he suggests, is a news and weather report from the soul.
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