" Did you know? When the bullet exploded the stars in the cosmos of your body, did you know that others would read manifestos by your light? Did you know, after the white ambulance left, before the coloured ambulance arrived, if you would live at all, that you would banish the apartheid of the ambulance with Mandela and a million demonstrators dancing at every funeral? Did you know, slamming the hammer into the rock’s stoic face, that a police state is nothing but a boulder waiting for the alchemy of dust? Did you know that, forty years later, college presidents and professors of English would raise their wine to your name and wonder what poetry they could write with a bullet in the back? "

― Martín Espada , The Republic of Poetry