Otto René Castillo

You have a gun
And I am hungry

You have a gun
Because I am hungry

You have a gun
Therefore I am hungry

You can have a gun
You can have a thousand bullets and even another thousand
You can waste them all on my poor body
You can kill me one, two, three, two thousand, seven thousand times
But in the long run
I will always be better armed than you

If you have a gun
And I
Only hunger.

When the enthusiasm
of our time
is recounted
for those
yet to be born,
but who announce themselves
with a kinder face,
we will come out winners,
we who have suffered most.

To be ahead
Of one's time
Is to suffer much.
But it is beautiful to love the world
with the eyes
of those
still
to be born.

And splendid
to know oneself already victorious
when everything around
is still so cold, so dark.

Otto Rene Castillo was a Guatemalan poet "brutally tortured for an extended period, and then burned alive [by US-backed forces].