Thursday
Today I share Otto Rene Castillo’s “Distances” in honor of the unbelievably brave Alexi Navalny, Russian leader of the opposition to Vladimir Putin, and to the equally brave demonstrators who are supporting him. The Guatemalan poet and activist would himself die in 1966, fighting against the brutal Guatemala regime, perhaps the worst in the world at that time. Castillo was first tortured and then burned alive.
I suspect that Castillo wrote the poem when he was in East Germany trying to figure out how to overthrow the government (thus “the bitter December air”). Friendship sometimes seems our only consolation when “the dictatorship is strong” and we are “desperate and pained.”
Distances
by Otto Rene CastilloUnder the bitter December air
a friend says
“I’m disillusioned. Everything goes
so slowly. The dictatorship is strong.
I’m desperate and pained
by the calvary of my people.”
And I, sensing his anguish, the gray
and noble sadness of my friend,
knowing his fight
to keep on fighting,
do not say: coward or go to the mountains
or lazy or pessimist,
rigid, poor devil.
I only put my arm around his shoulder,
so the tearing cruelty of his cold
be less.