La Llorona
Sometimes you walk out
under an old, cold moon to call.
You call, but there is no answer,
no heartbeat, no rhythm to follow or find.
Dry.
All you hear is traffic, dust,
Smoke obscuring the distance.
Your time is eaten by long lists of little
things.
The sounds of human discord ring like a
broken bell
where once the lucid air sang among the
stones,
this you know with bone knowledge,
bone history, you know this with your feet.
Where once the lucid air sang among the
subtle stones,
metates, petroglyphs. Where once a river flowed.
Even here, a river, before the cattle,
cars, too much thankless taking.
As if the waters would always flow.
As if the breast would never run dry.
As if, as if there were no children lost
And yet unborn, their open mouths,
Crying just beneath your feet.
Dry. I
look into my life, the river is dry.
I have also been eaten. There is no magic to
replenish
these years made of too many little things.
Sometimes, you hold your hands to the
mountain
You ask, "whose hands are these?"
Am I not also this land?
One small and moving piece of it?
You call, but there is no answer.
Where have they gone? Coyote moon celebrant,
even Snake and Scorpion, who leave all stones
best unturned?
Plastic katchinas made in China invent them.
Spirals written among the holy rocks are
silent,
where old men push little balls across green
grass
among the desert's drought.
Here, where once a river ran,
A river that ghosts among the stars.
(2002)
In looking at my 2018 illustrated poetry collection APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices I've had the urge to share some of them here (well, some of them I've already shared over the years but they are finally finished now!) Since very few people will ever read it, and I'm not doing any copyright infringements, I think I will share some of them here. This poem "ghosts" a river that sometimes I glimpse, a river lost in the dry arroyos of consumer culture. Perhaps, not my most optimistic of poems.............
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