"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché

A documentary poem by U.S. poet Carolyn Forché, who visited El Salvador in 1978. I first read this poem in the early 1980s, in Forché's book The Country Between Us, a book given to me by one of my anthropology professors, Peter Stephenson, who encouraged me to explore the ethnography as a literary genre, which I did in my first books. I have only now heard this poem read aloud.