IN SALVADOR, 1978-80<P>"In memory of Monsignor Oscar Romero"<P>Caminante, no hay camino<P>Se hace camino al andar.<P>Antonio MachadoSAN ONOFRE, CALIFORNIA<P>We have come far south.<BR>Beyond here, the oldest women<BR>shelling limas into black shawls. <BR>Portillo scratching his name <BR>on the walls, the slender ribbons<BR> of piss, children patting the mud<BR>. If we go on, we might stop <BR>in the street in the very place <BR>where someone disappeared <BR>and the words Come with us! we might <BR>hear them. If that happened, we would <BR>lead our lives with our hands <BR>tied together. That is why we feel <BR>it is enough to listen <BR>to the wind jostling lemons, <BR>to dogs ticking across the terraces, <BR>knowing that while birds and warmer weather <BR>are forever moving north, <BR>the cries of those who vanish <BR>might take years to get here. <BR><P>1977<P>THE ISLAND<P>FOR CLARIBEL ALFGRIA<P>IN Deya when the mist <BR>rises out of the rocks it comes<BR> so close to her hands she could <BR>tear it to pieces like bread. <BR>She holds her drink and motions <BR>with one hand to describe this: <BR>what she would do with so many <BR>baskets of bread. <BR><P>Mi "prieta," Asturias called her, <BR>my dark little one. Neruda <BR>used the word "negrita," and it is <BR>true: her eyes, her hair, <BR>both violent, as black <BR>as certain mornings have been <BR>for the last fourteen years. <BR>She wears a white cotton dress. <BR>Tiny mirrors have been stitched <BR>to it--when I look for myself <BR>in her, I see the same face <BR>over and over. <BR><P" have the fatty eyelids<BR> of a Slavic factory girl, <BR>the pale hair of mixed blood.<BR> Although Jose Marti has said <BR>

Carolyn ForchÉ is the author of Gathering the Tribes,winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award; The Country Between Uswhich received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America; and The Angel of Historyawarded the Los Angeles TimesBook Award. She is also the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Centuly Poetry of Witness.Recently she was presented with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.