AFTERWORD
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 Go outdoors on a clear night and look up at the billions of stars.Long, long ago, a person with imagination looked up at those same
stars and drew imaginary lines between them, linking them together and drawing pictures
that illustrate stories we have been telling about ourselves for as long as there have
been people in the world. To look at that mass of stars and see a bear, a hunter, seven
beautiful sisters, a crown, the Southern Cross may seem like a frivolous activity, but
ever since someone did that long ago, farmers have known when to plant and sailors how
to find their way on the sea.Police officers are men and women who take a test, get appointed by
the government, go to a basic school, are given a haircut and a uniform, work for twenty
or thirty years, retire, grow old and die. You could say that they are pretty ordinary,
unless they strike your imagination as they struck mine. I look at them like that field
of stars onto which I can project all the stories I want to tell.We've all agreed that the constellations named long ago are OK as
they are and we don't need to change them. But nothing could stop me from saying that
the Southern Cross has a new meaning. I know that if you read that poem and you
understand the tragedy that moved me to write it you will share in seeing that meaning.
And you will see it even if you never travel to the Southern Hemisphere. And when you
see it, you will never forget those five young DEA agents who fell out of the Peruvian
sky like stars and are now shining up there forever.I hope that you have enjoyed meeting some remarkable people and
learning some useful things. More than anything else, I hope that I have helped you to
see the power of poetry to express feelings we all share, to give life and meaning to
our institutions and to bind us all together and more than anything else to inspire hope
that we can imagine solutions to the problems and conflicts that afflict our lives and
communities.One of the great poets of the Twentieth Century was a Spaniard named
Federico Garcia Lorca.He was a most remarkable man. One of America's great poets, Robert
Bly, wrote of him: "There is no other poet like him in the history of poetry. Everyone who
reads a poem of Lorca's falls in love with him, and has a secret friend. All the rest of
his life, whenever he thinks of Lorca, he notices a red ray of sunlight hit the ground a
few inches from his feet."Lorca died young and tragically. During the Spanish Civil War, he was
taken out and shot by what I guess you could call authority figures -- sort of like cops.Lorca wrote a beautiful poem "The Ballad of the Little Square" about
what it is that a poet wants to do -- what Lorca was doing in the world that some people
found objectionable and even dangerous. Here is part of it:My heart of silk is filled with lights, with lost bells, with lilies and bees. I will go very far, farther than those mountains, farther than the oceans, way up near the stars, to ask Christ the Lord to give back to me the soul I had as a child, matured by fairy tales, with its hat of feathers and its wooden sword.
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