for Berta Caceres

Of course, it always all comes out (eventually)
but now today it comes out beforehand
and it’s not just that after they run the same plays
so many times the patterns do become familiar
and the same scene replayed too many times
can become a persistent sore, open wound
bruised bone ready to turn into cancer
at the repeated insult, the next insult
like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
and JFK’s assassination officially
by a disaffected loner lone gunman
so each president pardons the preceding war crimes
with Obama it was “I’m just moving on”
and “I’m looking forward, not back”
and there it is waiting there for him,
a coup brewing in Honduras
whose president had been hobnobbing in Venezuela with Chavez
(and he’s actually helping the indigenes try to protect their land)
so the Honduran elected president is taken out of the country in a plane
that stops for refueling at the nearest U.S. base
and Obama’s Sec. of State steps in to legitimize the new regime
elections are held and Hillary will later say
in her book written as part of presidential campaign
“Zelaya (former President) was made Moot by the election”

Except in the paperback version that phrase
has been deleted now and in Honduras, good old Honduras
that helped us, the U.S. back in Contra
days when R. Reagan and Oliver North
were shipping cocaine to us, (the U.S.)
to buy guns for those Contras to kill
public health nurses and teachers in Nicaragua
that Honduras where a plane crashed
proving C.I.A. and actually H.W. Bush
involvement in death squads and drug deals
and illegal weapons shipments and torture (of course)
that Honduras where all those
refugees come from or try to come from
fleeing the drug gangs started in us, the U.S.
in our cities and deported to Honduras, that Honduras
where Berta Caceres has just been assassinated,
an environmental activist and leader of a movement
of indigenous people fighting for their rights,
shot in her own house
while one of her friends staying with her is shot twice
but survives and as a Mexican national
flees to that country’s embassy but is arrested
again by Special Operations troops trained by us, the U.S.
and then another activist environmentalist is murdered
and the only one who witnessed her death is disappeared
and all of this is disappeared in the U.S.

Even as dozens of women show up in us, the U.S.
Washington D.C. to chant “You have not killed Berta.
You have only made Berta into all of us. We are all Berta now.”
Meanwhile Hillary’s e-mails, the ones the Repugni-cants hauled out
from her private server and which they have
been “investigating” for security leaks
for years now, those e-mails, the ones Bernie did not make an issue of,
those e-mails show us in detail the way in which
Hillary worked to make legitimate the Regime
which is holding the only witness to Berta’s murder incognito;
indeed Berta had called out Hillary’s role in legitimating
the coup (judicial) through their Supreme Court,
but Hillary was now “inevitable”. The Obama administration
is paying the Mexican government to turn back the Central American refugees
from 40 years of our, the U.S. policies, at Mexico’s southern border
and pen them up in detention centers there
or send them back to the murderers they fled.
Refugees in Central America. Refugees in Europe.
Refugees in the Middle East. Refugees in East Africa.
Refugees in North Africa. Refugees everywhere and
Berta Caceres dead in Honduras, that Honduras.
And Ms. Sec. of State running for president,
cum Corporate Caesar, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

 

Huge protests erupted in Dec. 2017 in Honduras after the vote count in their elections
for president were stopped with the opposition leading by 5% and a few days later the
current president brought to power by the 2009 coup was declared victor even though
their constitution forbids the incumbent president from running for re-election.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.