Arms

You have a gun
And I am hungry

You have a gun
because
I am hungry

You have a gun
therefore
I am hungry

You can have a gun
you can have a thousand bullets and even another thousand
you can waste them all on my poor body,
you can kill me one, two, three, two thousand, seven thousand times
but in the long run
I will always be better armed than you
if you have a gun
And I
only hunger.

by M.J. Arce

This poem is found at the beginning of Chapter VI in Penny Lernoux's Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America-The Catholic Church in Conflict with U.S. Policy. and is originally from "Arms" by M.J. Arce, from Guatemala, edited by Susanne Jones and David Tobis.