" (lines 20-21) the journalist, the activist... must be the observer and not make the news. Lastly the point-of-view of the unnamed dead, "enemy" whose ears were cut off to use an example of cruelty and to elicit fear, "Some of the ears on the floor/caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on / the floor were pressed to the ground." (lines 31-33) Perhaps the ears were still listening to the messages of their cause, while others were either deaf to it, blocked by the arbitrary falling upon the floor or even listening for the future. When one places an ear to the ground, he or she is listening intently and with every shred of his or her being for coming danger or change, yet the disembodied and now personified ears could not have realistically been listening, they were symbols in a small grocery sack and now in a threatening message to interlopers of the many who had died for an unknown cause. The politics of language is clear in these two works, both global and intimate and the portrayal of the individual, voiceless and nameless carries the human message of torture. Each participant...

The legacy of human cruelty is clearly demonstrated in each work, and the causes that were described, through the violence of the aftermath rather than the issues being fought for are examples of the interplay of power and collective fear.
Works Cited

Forche, Carolyn "The Colonel" in the Country Between Us, New York and London, 1981.

Forche, Carolyn. "6 the Poetry of Witness." The Writer in Politics. Ed. William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. 135-161.

Hamilton, Ian. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Heaney, Seamus "Punishment" in North London 1975.