These tin icons represent the FMLN, shot-gauge target practice
stand-ins for guerillas of the red zone, who've taken back
the province of Northern Moraz-n. The very day Reagan
thumbs up progress in human rights, Radio Venceremos
reports to The Times that evangelists in El Mozote
are massacred en masse, a ritual orgy feast in
thorns and maguey. The first photographer to get there
is Meiselas, who crosses the Rio Torola in bikini
underwear in the middle of the night, sun-up
to discover the remains of a thousand children
of mother Immaculate, mother of the virgin jungle snake.
Roque Dalton's dead: the guitarristas are singing
in Managua, but here only carcass birds are leaning
on the wind. What witch is come to haunt silt terraces,
caves of an underground ocean reaching to Peru,
to Titicaca Lake, to liberators lost? She shadows
every farmer who's ever read Marx or the Sandinista
novelists, or Storni out of Argentina. For now,
the U.S.-trained troops reign in Salvador, each
with a dollar of mine in his pocket, taking pistol potshots
at journalists or poets who limp away from here towards home.

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