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I didn't want this to be your torturer's poem,
didn't want to let the cruel metaphors
he enacted on your flesh
play out again in my words.
I wanted to say that your hands
trembled with fierce love,
not that they have shaken
since the soldiers hung you
from a tree on the banks
of the Magdalena River
for two days in the searing sun,
but how else could I say
that you refused to give their names
to the guerrillas who wanted
to avenge your strange crucifixion,
and how you said,
"From the very first day
I forgave my torturer,
if I met him today I would embrace him?"
There is no fierceness in love that hasn't suffered,
no mystery in the tranquility of those who have not known fear.
Hector, I want to sing your transfiguration
without replacing your eyes with the cold white
of a plaster gringo Jesus,
I want to tell the miracle of how your battered body
fed the hearts of the striking oil workers
and yet continued to live,
I want to speak the secret of how your words came like fire
in the locked room where we called you by a different name
so no one who found our notes could tell the death squads where you were
and if your murdered companeros were killed twice,
once by bullets and once by silence,
let my song for you be their resurrection,
bringing them marching down the Septima
with brightly painted banners
proclaiming another world is born.
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