Episode 38: Because One is Always Forgotten

Connor and Jack talk about Carolyn Forche's elegy "Because One Is Always Forgotten" digging into the troubled history of the United States' involvement in South and Central America -- many times being on the wrong side of (and in some cases starting) brutal conflicts. This episode comes out the same week that Oliver North, the man indicted in the Iran-Contra Scandal, was named president of the NRA: proof that this 30+ year old poem's themes of remembrance and resistance are eerily relevant.

Because One Is Always Forgotten
By: Carolyn Forche

In memoriam Jose Rudolfo Viera
1939-1981: El Salvador

When Viera was buried we knew it had come to an end,
his coffin rocking into the ground like a boat or a cradle.

I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a campesino
and he would cut it up and give it back:

You can’t eat heart in those four dark
chambers where a man can be kept years.

A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife
to peel the face from a dead man

and hang it from the branch of a tree
flowering with such faces.

The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.