La Revolucion Is Dead. Long Live La Revolucion.

Che Guevra was executed by firing squad forty years ago today, according to Wiki, in Bolivia, where he was captured in a military operation supported by the CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces. He had some Celt in him, as well as Basque, and he wrote poetry.

In his notebook, taken when he was executed, he had written the following poem by Cesar Vallego:

The Black Heralds

There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
the undertow of everything suffered
welled up in the soul . . . I don’t know!

They are few; but they are . . . They open dark trenches
in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.
Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas;
or the black heralds sent to us by Death.

They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,
of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloodstained blows are the crackling of
bread burning up at the oven door.

And man . . . Poor . . . poor! He turns his eyes, as
when a slap on the shoulder summons us;
turns his crazed eyes, and everything lived,
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his look.

There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know!