Here is the poem, Why We Are Here, which author Robert Arthur Lewis was
distributing in Seattle, on the occasion of the World Trade Organization

Ministerial Summit in 1999:

Why We Are Here

Because the world we imagined, the one
we had always counted on
is disappearing.
Because the sun has become cancerous
and the planet is getting hotter.
Because shildren are starving in the shadows
of yachts and economic summits.
Because there are already too many planes in the sky.

This is the manufactured world
you have come here to codify and expedite.
We have come to tell you
there is something else we want to buy.

What we want, money no longer recognizes
like the vitality of nature, the integrity of work.
We don't want cheaper wood, we want living trees.
We don't want engineered fruit, we want to see and smell the
food growing
in our own neighborhoods.

We are here because a voice inside us,
a memory in our blood, tells us
you are not just a trade body, you are the blind tip
of a dark wave that has forgotten its source.
We are here to defend and honor
what is real, natural, human and basic
against the rising tide of greed.

We are here by the insistence of spirit and the authority of
nature.
If you doubt for one minute the power of truth
or the primacy of nature
try not breathing for that length of time.

Now you know the pressure of our desire.
We are not here to tinker with your laws.
We are here to change you from the inside out.
This is not a political protest.
It is an uprising of the soul.

        -- Robert Arthur Lewis
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Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan,
de todos.

(I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone)

Roque Dalton