Before I begin this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence in honor of those

বড্ড প্রাসঙ্গিক একটা কবিতা, আবেদন রইল যদি কেউ অনুবাদের দায়িত্ব নাও, বর্তমান কনটেক্সটে।

Before I begin this poem,

I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence in honor of those

who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001.

I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,

for the victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, in the U.S., and throughout the world.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence…
for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence… for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of a 12-year U.S. embargo against the country.…

And now, the drums of war beat again.

Before I begin this poem,
two months of silence…
for the Blacks under Apartheid in SouthAfrica, where “homeland security” made them aliens in their own country Nine months of silence…

for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin, and the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence… for the millions of dead in VietNam­—a people, not a war—for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives bones buried in it, their babies born of it.

Two months of silence… for the decades of deadin Colombia, whose names, like the corpses theyonce represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem,Seven days of silence… for El Salvador

A day of silence… for Nicaragua

Five days of silence… for the Guatemaltecos
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.

45 seconds of silence… for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas…

1,933 miles of silence… for every desperate body
That burns in the desert sun
Drowned in swollen rivers at the pearly gates to the Empire’s underbelly,

A gaping wound sutured shut by razor wire and corrugated steel.

25 years of silence… for the millions of Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence…
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been.…
Because this is not a 9-11 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem…
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem,
then This is a September 11th 1973 poem for Chile.

This is a September 12th 1977 poem for Steven Biko in South Africa.

This is a September 13th 1971 poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York.

This is a September 14th 1992 poem for the people of Somalia.

This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground amidst the ashes of amnesia.
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told,
The 110 stories that history uprooted from its textbooks
The 110 stories that that cnn, bbc, The New YorkTimes, and Newsweek ignored.

This is a poem for interrupting this program.
This is not a peace poem,
Not a poem for forgiveness.
This is a justice poem,A poem for never forgetting.

~ Emmanuel Ortiz