Now Sing
NOW sing: the guards howling
beat him with obscenities.
……But he did.
His legend is
He was singing
………………………Venceremos
when they shot him.
Even for them, it was too much
The killed him,
they couldn't kill him enough.
Victor Jara
…………………..sin guitarra.
who'd held out with bloody stumps
…………………………………………..and sung.
by James Scully
from Poetry Like Bread is for Everyone
Curbstone Press, 1994
Histroical note:
When the socialist politician Salvador Allende dramatically won Chile’s presidential election in 1970, a powerful cultural movement accompanied him to power as folk singers emerged at the forefront proving that music could help forge the birth of a new society. “Venceremos” charts the development of such a cultural phenomenon from the years before Allende’s victorious campaign to the brutal U.S.-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, which ousted his presidency and imposed the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The bloody repression that followed would claim the life of Víctor Jara, a key singer-songwriter, but could never put to rest the lasting power of his songs nor the movement he personified.