Читать книгу Preaching in/and the Borderlands - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Harold J. Recinos

they travel with homes stuffed

into small bags, sleep in fields,

on hard dirt floors, bus station

benches, on tractor trains, beside

the rivers that have for centuries

rounded hills, and beneath distant

stars hanging like lanterns in an

ancient sky. along the underground

railroad on the long walk toward the

border, light on the walls of Spanish

speaking shacks open their eyes to

the simple frailty of life, the voices

fled in grief, the choking feeling in

the company of other women and

children walking away from endless

poverty and violence that they will

be changed and their children by the

year’s end no longer recognized. in

lucid moments they stare at evening

stars blinking stories of hate waiting

to include them at the border, offering

quiet prayers to God who hides in the

black patches between dots of celestial

light forgetting to comfort them. they

have ambled Sunday shoes dark in less

than forty days, El Norte drawing near

with each brown step, children insisting

with occasional tears they can keep the

pace, giving illness in their long days

another name, trying to reach America

scrubbed fresh with dreams, hoping when

they come up against the southern wall

they are not named poison, or living filth

by the Lilly white people living behind

the locked door who stopped emptying

their years of memories made complete

on the land whose border their names

crossed to become another country