We need to move.
She didn’t remember anything else
except those words
except the feeling
squelching over a frictionless earth
beneath the void void of empathy
for the shivering bodies plunging into
thoughtless platoons of piercing rainfall
so thick, so fast, como si Dios
Himself was perched amidst the clouds
quenching His world with Dios-sized buckets
bringing life to the dead of night
to the chagrin of a family freezing
to cross a squiggly man-made line
drawn in the burgundy lore of age-old
events, men, treaties, guns, a history
of cracked earth stampeded upon and now
stampeding anew with equal ferocity,
in the rank miasma of nature,
if only dinner and a warm roof
could grow from the muddy vegetation
or a soul in the world who gave a damn
might surmount the opening horizon:
a light so faint it couldn’t be real;
tantalizing, yet, it may not be real.
