The sky
pearls to morning and she unfurls from her sarape
to light the fire.
Warmth tendrils
into the chill around her hearth.
With the
first spit of sun, she heats black coffee and shapes fresh tortillas,
wiping
her hands on a green plaid apron fringed with eyelet.
Venus
reflects in the water tub as she scrubs her face.
She prods
her son and her daughter to awaken.
They walk
far to their cornfield struggling skyward,
cradled
in a cupped palm between mountains.
She digs,
digs and pulls up by deep roots the weeds that creep between rows of green
stalks.
She knows
their resistance, and lays them gently in a swelling heap.
She sorts
out the delicate verdolagas for
dinner.
With the
sun at eye level, in the wrinkled shade of a ceiba, she gives
her daughter water from a gourd.
She mounds
red earth round her plants, and with a frayed blue rebozo wipes
sweat and dust from her neck.
At noon
they rest and eat tortillas and hard-cooked eggs. Her children nap.
Back in
the field, toes sunk into the earth, her son tugs her woolen skirt,
points to
the bulk of mountains surrounding them.
The
shadows are still there, a curling gloom of serpents around the base of pines.
She looks
again and they are gone.
You only
see bad luck from the corner of your eye.
And
suddenly they are in her field, a menace of black boots in uniforms the rank color
of leaf-mold.
Their guns
point toward darkening clouds.
They are
many. Too many. Maybe ten. Maybe twelve.
She asks
if they would help clear her field. They are younger than she by ten.
Thunder
repeats in the air sharp with a promise of rain.
The sun
resists falling.
She lays
one earth-brown hand gently on a young soldier’s arm.
She says “Go
home. We are not the problem.”
Her words
buzz like wasps, and he pushes her, not gently, with the point of his rifle.
The sun
resists falling.
Her
daughter cries out. She picks thumb-sized flowers from the discarded weeds,
offers a fist
of petals to the steel-eyed soldier.
Her eyes
are like the lagunita where he swam
as a child.
He orders
them to hush. He orders them to turn. The sun resists falling.
He orders
them to close their eyes. He orders them to kneel. The sun resists falling.
Thunder
like an avalanche, filling their ears, then nothing.
The men
slither up to the shelter of pines.
The
family is motionless.
There is
still water in their gourds.
A crow
mourns in the distance. Their skin
muddies in the rain-softened earth.
The sun
sinks weary, weary into the breast of the mountain.
Her
children run ahead, carrying a morral
with supper greens.
She
follows them closely, the corner of one eye trained on bad luck.
Some
days, resistance is as simple as a fistful of weeds. Others, it will not be.
Poem posted in this space, September 8, 2009
To contact Mary Ellen Sanger send an email to mesanger@hotmail.com
