Carolyn Forché

There is much in this drawer that is no longer in use:
a notebook with ribbon to mark passages
once of some importance, a tortoiseshell comb sadly
made of tortoise shell, a prayer book bound
in mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl.
And sounds: a blurring of bees in the air
no longer heard in the wild.
Everything at once, she had said. All that you
remember must be written down.
Bed linens sailing the wind, curtains flaring
beyond the windscreens, lilacs soon to lie on the ground.

When Carolyn Forché used the term “poetry of witness” in her introduction to a 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting, she was the first. By then, she’d spent time in the years from 1978 to 1980 in El Salvador, where she had witnessed violence at the hands of the country’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship.