Wednesday, September 11, 2013

A Room of My Own: Other 9/11s

For Susan Sontag, author of Regarding the Pain of Others, who claimed that: The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.


first September Eleventh
in the sky and on Chilean streets
blood, fire and smoke

stardust ...
spiraling numbers etched
into the cenotaph

a veiled woman
touches the names
September Eleventh


Note: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile that ousted democratically-elected Salvador Allende in 1973 and led to a 17-year repressive dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. For more information, see Democracy Now! in Depth: 1973 Chilean Coup


Updated, September 12, 2013

As the United States marked the 12th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Chile commemorated what is known as the first 9/11 — the September 11, 1973 — the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende. In a ceremony at the presidential palace where her father was killed, Allende’s daughter, Chilean Senator Isabel Allende, said "truth and justice" is the only path to healing from the coup’s lingering damage.

Isabel Allende: "Only truth and justice will allow us to come back together as a country. And the ethical values and the values that never again break the democracy, never again have a coup, never to break constitutional order again, never again to hunt someone down because of their beliefs, never again torture or state terrorism."
-excerpted from Democracy Now!


Updated September 13, 2013

John Kerry meets coup plotter Henry Kissinger on the 40th anniversary of Chile's Sept. 11
The only reason Henry Kissinger should be pursued is to be held accountable, like Pinochet, in a court of law. by Amy Goodman

Read the full text here.

2 comments:

  1. This is our reply to violence: to make haiku more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. Changing the world one haiku at a time.

    -- Chen-ou Liu paraphrasing Leonard Bernstein, Changing the World One Haiku at a Time: Review of Kamesan’s World Haiku Anthology on War, Violence and Human Rights Violation, which can be accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2013/06/a-poets-roving-thoughts-changing-world.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ls 2&3 of the opening haiku allude to Joel 2:30 (Old Testament)

    I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. (New International Version)

    ReplyDelete