Watching the news recently made me remember a poem I had published in the Raven Chronicles Special Issue: This Neutral Air – 9/11: What Needs To Be Said. The poem is entitled NORTE AMERICANO and appears below.
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Norte Americano
We have arrived at the end of the earth, cannibalizing
the four directions, everything that lies between.
There is no end to what we cannot have, which is what we want;
every king knows this—the world is not enough.
Hunger consumes its children, picks over the bones that remain.
We are the children of bones, oblivious to what consumes us.
We are loud.
Silence has many advantages—hearing what we cannot have,
the open hand, the space it leaves, the nothing that is left
our one hope, emptiness capable of receiving, what is simple:
the heft of a hoe handle,
the weight of water
a fist uncurling fingers
surrendering this infinite seduction, the chain of want
spread across the globe as a cloud, pale as the skin of ghosts.