Hello and welcome back. Welcome to September!

The every-weekday podcast has been on a break for the summer months, when I’ve been publishing an occasional series of three poems on a theme. But it’s September now, and here we go!

If this is your first time here, you’re very welcome. My name is Shane Breslin and words matter to me. I’m a writer, and my day to day work is with businesses who want to craft words for their brands. In the age of ChatGPT and words written by humans are under some form of threat, or at least evolution. For me the most important thing about words, though, is not that how they communicate information. It’s how they can carry what lies in the human heart. Call me a Luddite, but I’m not sure a machine — no matter how well trained — will ever be able to write words that carry the deep meaning of the human heart. This podcast, Poems for the Speed of Life, is my personal commitment to keeping words of the human heart alive in the world.

If this is your first time here, I recommend finding and listening to Episode 100. In that episode, I outline some of the reasons this podcast exists.

Okay, on with today’s show. The poem is “I wanted” by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by American poet and essayist Anne Boyer. Roque Dalton was a poet, essayist, bohemian, romantic and Communist revolutionary from El Salvador.

In the words of Claribel Alegria, Dalton had “a profound conviction that the poet can and must, in his life as well as in his work, serve as the finely-honed scalpel of change, both in word and deed, when he lives in a profoundly unjust, stagnant society.”

Imprisoned and sentenced to death in his homeland, and then exiled all before the age of 26 for inciting revolt, he spent most of his time thereafter in the Cuba of Fidel Castra and Che Guevara, but also maintained links with his homeland, including joining El Salvador’s Communist guerrila army the ERP, or People’s Revolutionary Army, in 1973.

Never one to hold back, he fell out with the leader of the ERP, Alejandro Rivas Mira, and was executed in 1975, a few days short of his 40th birthday.

This poem, I wanted, takes the form of a litany, an incomplete, unordered, even disordered list of things the poet wanted to do with his life, including a foreshadowing of his death.

You can read the poem here

For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here to listen on Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://onsound.eu/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com