​Sarstoon Silence
​ 
After decades
US Military attaché George Maynes stands
Akimbo
It is 1982
Behind him a door splattered in paint
From conquest to coup
GUAT
TE
MALA
We see them
Not us
Fishing in OUR
WATERS
Not theirs
Belizean fish vs Guatemalan fish
Our media in skiffs
We get to see the mountains
Way beyond
Where Rigoberta lives
Where Rios Mont Lives
 
This morning
The Sarstoon is silent
Its murky mercurial meanderings
The diplomats are eating cotton
In the bush bones buried
In a Starbucks soccer moms are sipping
Huehuetenango coffee
 
The fatigues worn by General Efrain and General Horacio
Seem similar to their North American counterparts
A geometry of geography
A topography of terror
Lasting over half a millennia
 
Welcome to British Honduras
The future capital of crime
Some of keep calling
Beckoning the British
Brexit Boys from Buckingham
 
A young mother paddles her canoe
Fishing off the coast
At the mouth of River Sarstoon
Just five hundred years earlier
In the same area
The younger brother of Christopher
Bartholomew Columbus
“boarded a canoe,
and found it was a Maya trading vessel
from Yucatán,
carrying well-dressed Maya and a rich cargo
The Europeans looted whatever took their
seized the elderly captain
the first recorded contact between
Europeans and the Maya”
Says Wikipedia
 
In 1982 Susan Meiselas takes a snapshot
In a cemetery with unmarked graves in Antigua
 
In 1981
In New York
Do we still remember?