I would love Central America to be one country. We are the same everywhere. We belong to this beautiful cosmic race and it is the cosmic race that is… - Claribel Alegría Vides

I will tell you one anecdote that was shattering to me: Right after the peace agreements Bud and I went to El Salvador and I wanted to go to Guasapa—one of the guerilla strongholds. I met an old lady there who said to me with tears in her eyes, “So why all of these wars? I lost my husband, I lost two of my children, I lost my son-in-law, for what?” I cried with her. I didn’t know what to tell her. As you said, she was wounded. That’s why people don’t want to talk about it. But this refusal to speak about it is transitory. Sooner or later we have to face it. We have to reach inside ourselves, and inside our people, too. It’s a lot of work, but something great is going to come from it. Maybe I will not be alive to see it.

The poet celebrates humankind, the universe, and the creator of the universe. It is impossible for one to remain indifferent to the turbulence that our planet and its inhabitants suffer through: war, hunger, earthquakes, misery, racism, violence, xenophobia, deforestation, AIDS, and childhood affliction, among others. In the region from which I come, Central America, we love poetry, and at times we use it to denounce what is happening around us. There are many fine testimonial poems. The poet, especially where I’m from, cannot and should not remain in an ivory tower.

I hope we go back into our Indian roots in the next century, bring them to the surface, study them. There is only an elite that knows of the great richness and wisdom in the Popol Vuh (The Book of the Dawn of Life), we are going to get as much from this as we do from our Spanish heritage.