Guevara – A Poem

Author, poet and filmmaker Nadja Tesich submitted the poem, “Guevara,” translated from Serbian, for publication in Workers World. We know Tesich from our common work attempting to defend her homeland, Yugoslavia, from an unrelenting assault by the imperialist governments of Western Europe and the United States.

Tragically for most of the peoples of the Balkans, these years ended with the imposed disintegration of a once-sovereign socialist country into a half-dozen mini-states, now neocolonies of the NATO powers.

Tesich, whose family emigrated from Yugoslavia to the U.S. when she was a young teenager, has had four novels published: “Shadow Partisan” in 1996, “Native Land” in 1998, “To Die in Chicago” in 2010 and “Far from Vietnam” in 2012.

It is particularly striking to read “Shadow Partisan” and “To Die in Chicago” one after the other. The novels contrast on a close and personal level a hopeful coming-of-age in newly socialist Yugoslavia in the late 1940s with a cleareyed immigrant’s view of U.S. racism and a consumer-driven society without a future in the 1950s.

The poem “Guevara” has been published in CubaNews.

GUEVARA

If death comes
may it be welcome,
others will replace me
he said once.
His beautiful face
killed by U.S. mercenaries and CIA
in Bolivia, La Higuera.
Yet his face
is all over América Latina
next to Christ
in every peasant hut.
Che never died,
in death he grew
and grew and grew.
Latin America
moves
is moving
will move
with his face
in front.

Nadja Tesich