Easter Sunday, 1985
by Charles Martin
To take steps toward the reappearance alive of the disappeared is a subversive act,
and measures will be adopted to deal with it.
............. —General Oscar Mejia Victores, President of Guatemala
In the Palace of the President this morning,
The General is gripped by the suspicion
That those who were disappeared will be returning
In a subversive act of resurrection.
Why do you worry? The disappeared can never
Be brought back from wherever they were taken;
The age of miracles is gone forever;
These are not sleeping, nor will they awaken.
And if some tell you Christ once reappeared
Alive, one Easter morning, that he was seen—
Give them the lie, for who today can find him?
He is perhaps with those who were disappeared,
Broken and killed, flung into some ravine
With his arms safely wired up behind him.
(From
Starting from Sleep, p. 130. First published in Stealing the Bacon.)
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19255
Comments:
Many of us here have lately been writing poems based on material from news stories, so it’s more than apt for me to talk about this poem by Charles Martin. I’ve gone on record elsewhere with my admiration for it, and I’m glad to have a reason to discuss it in more detail.
Admittedly, I am this poem’s ideal reader. As a believer, struggling but still hanging on, I live the liturgical year. Easter is not academic to me; it’s a reality. I am also old enough to remember when
los desaparecidos were matters not only of urgent news coverage but of activist song: the Ronnie Gilbert and Holly Near performance of “Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida” rests in the permanent archive of my brain. The epigraph connects with those firm memories, as well as with the knowledge that—to the world’s sorrow—the horror of forced disappearance in Latin America continues.
The epigraph deserves close attention, since poets wrestle with the decision to use or not to use epigraphs. This one is not optional. This one is vital; it sets the scene for the poem’s righteous rage. Its words are perfectly chosen because they show us how completely authority can fall into desperate unjustice.
To take steps toward the reappearance alive of the disappeared says, without saying it, that the deaths of the disappeared were always the goal, and that not to cooperate in those deaths is subversion.
Measures will be adopted to deal with it: the passive voice, the unspecified threats, of all terrible bureaucracies. That is our starting point.
The first stanza sets us up: It restates the situation that the epigraph presents, but puts the epigraph’s speaker—and every leader like him—in third-person focus, concentrating not on his power but on his fear—
gripped by the suspicion—the fear that makes power tenuous and so drives tyranny. It makes this restatement in formal pentameters and rhyme, the tight containment of its form like a package that holds a bomb. The final word of the stanza—
resurrection—splices the wires of the title and the epigraph, and the completed circuit sets going the poem proper.
And the poem proper is complex. It begins in ironic calm, seemingly in sympathy with the dictator
(Why do you worry?) Yet its claim that
The disappeared can never be brought back moves to the realm of despair. It stresses the saddest facts of such cases: Of the disappeared, one has no idea of
wherever they were taken.
Then it links again to resurrection stories, denying them, despairing both about the faith of the Gospels and about any justice for the kidnapped and tortured and murdered:
The age of miracles is gone forever. (Gone, it says, not “false from the beginning,” a hint that perhaps we are not wrong to believe.) Its last line references the Gospel story of the daughter of Jairus, and by reversing—effectively unsaying—the words of Jesus, it makes its despair complete:
These are not sleeping, nor will they awaken.
The Biblical register of the poem’s diction is one more element that pulls everything tight. The first three lines of the sestet (and now we can see that this is a sonnet) continue the tone of controlled rage, and of despair. Speaking of Christ, the tercet echoes the words of the epigraph about the disappeared: reappeared alive. There is no risen Christ present in the world, it says, angrily and insistently:
give them the lie, for who today can find him? And in the last tercet, it make two huge, dramatic moves: It locates the dead Christ with the disappeared, physically and morally, and it rivets us by ending with the ugly specifics of that image:
flung into some ravine/with his hands safely wired up behind him.
Note the irony of that
safely, which reminds us that we are still with the dictator, still in conversation with him, still in enraged confrontation.
I want to believe there is hope hiding under the poem’s political and religious despair, and in its absolute claim that holiness is on the side of murdered.