El Salvador

19 humma John Humma£1 Salvador It is, among other things, a building. It cannot help, it says, the bog it dreams in. The bog has always been there: deep, silent, and now red. The building floats in the dream. Once it was seven stories, now only three are seen: the view from the underwindows is mud. Vine makes love to the rest, slips its fingers between windows and sills, finds out the crackers and roaches in the drawers. It fingers the spines of books, makes a move beneath our pants legs, under our skirts. Who dare refuse? And the wages: lest we forget what we are, there are the wages. Do you wonder we sometimes break a little wind in the night. Only a very little: still, they come, in the deeper dead of night, they saw our heads from our trunks. Therefore, we fear and love the night: it is our freedom. Meanwhile, vine crawls up our thighs, we feel it curling round our flesh, the flesh goes gray beneath it. The exotic green world (they brag they have saved us, they say they have brought the earth to us) creeps ever closer until we can call the hour almost it will fold around our hearts. And this (we say) is home, is work, is life. It is rather the tomb of our slain fathers where, curled in the scarlet mud, our children weep to be born. ...