Letter to Comrade Nazim Hikmet

Comrade Nazim: this morning 

I recall your house in Peredelkino 

resembling the heart of a gigantic pine forest,

I remember the ample fraternity of your antarctic eyes, your crystalline poetry. 

I take care of your gifts: the colorful wooden spoon 

and the picture of Lenin 

and I hope the awesome clay head from Izalco that I left in your hands speaks to you often about my poor country and its bitter bread. 

Comrade Nazim: I write this from the neighborhood of sudden dread 

from the Fifth Cell Block in the Central Penitentiary of El Salvador. 

I couldn't do this before when I was free 

because feeling playful and bubbly at liberty 

one cannot raise words 

to the high occasion of prisoners, the old prisoners 

who, like you, showed the way to see prison as one more tiny step of stone 

on the road to winning a little of the future freedom for everyone.  

They've held me prisoner, comrade, 

for nineteen days now. 

The same ones who brand the dark rose, 

heart of our country, with red-hot irons and acids, who stole my freedom as though it were simply an object 

and surrounded me with hatred, guards and walls and took from me the currents of the wind, 

the stars, the streets, the eyes of girls, 

the downpours of these latitudes that look for our flesh only to find fire. 

And here I am, with the poor murderer 

in spite of him, with the thief, the rapist, 

and the ignorant one, sharing our daily mire and insults, 

combining our breathing with the usual outcries, from behind bars, 

watching the days pass like exhausted swallows, pathetic wings, accused of anything for having loved hope 

and defended life and having begun to be a man once 

and for all going all out, full blast, barely pausing to examine my apparent conceit, as it turned out. When do I get out of here? It doesn't matter. 

What does is that in spite of the hatred, the pain, the uncertainty, 

we must follow with Firmness in the footsteps of the heart, 

always together in the struggle, facing hope, and happy, happy, very happy... 

Please excuse my confused expression and ideas: 

there's a touch of fever and anxiety between my crazed hands and brain; 

what's more, according to the news other comrades have been arrested... 

I enclose some poems from these last days, where friends speak from their cells, 

only some of them, there are three hundred and twenty of us. 

Will you give my regards to Memet? 

And you take good care of your heart. 

Especially today when America has many doorways for you and your poetry. 

I won't take up any more of your precious time — has the snow melted yet in Moscow? — 

and I close these lines with an embrace. 

So long. 

May we keep on hauling up the morning. 

January, 1960. 

Roque Dalton