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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? |