Although you have disappeared, you live in our heart
By Eliseo Balcazar
Dear mother and father
Dear sisters and brother
Dear companion and friends
Where are you? Where ... are you?
December, January
June August
What's the matter time
Where are you? Where?
If before the day
We parted
With great emotion
With the hope
That we will meet again in
The following day
But past there day
and you don't appear
A lot of people and
Especially you family
We were very concerned for you
As very crazy people
we were seeking for you
In hospitals police stations
In the morgues and you don't appear
But how can you appear
If in the clandestine jail
you my sister and my brother
Give your life for our freedom
Because in a day not too far
Our children and the flowers
Growing with a wonderful dusk
and with the laughter and a new sunrise
There all people can walk in freedom
Around your rivers and you volcanos
And in wonderful streets of the city
Never my sisters and brothers
I forget the corrupt face of
Internal ministry of governation
When he said to a mother
That with tears
In her tired eyes
And with a great anguish
reflected in her old face
When the mother
Inquired for her daughter
For her son
Maybe for her husband
Don't worry, he said
With a big laughter
In his cynical face
And sitting very comfortably
My sisters, my brothers
where are you? Where?
Is our agony in our daily lives
Oh bless idea
Oh bless blood
Oh bless seeds of life
Where are you?
Where are you thousands and thousands of Guatemalans
That one day you have kidnapped?
[Eliseo Balcazar is a survivor of torture in Guatemala and now lives in Melbourne.]