308

The rooster was calling forth the virgin birth

of sun, or vice versa, the dancing girls

snoring as light unwrinkles the

landscape like sight itself.  The digging

must have taken a sum of effort,

hours lost

to a hole.

 

A whole world in the digging

up of rainlessness

this week, this month

this time of year

overflowing the open doors of the village

medicine man

 

while bones like fossils unearthed

for the nonbelievers

the uninitiated

the naïve and otherwise

occupied. Each available

to an ordinary morning,

shaving and shitting.

 

And the farmers, and the merchants and migrants

with their arms folded over their chests

and rivals of the men who would change you

and the faced down women, who one day

a time ago, dreamt of being of noble blood

bending over the low tide for mussels.

And now the digging continues

a modern excavation of bullet holed bodies.

 

Nothing available

to redeem anyone.

 

And so they swallowed their sighs in

regret and pulled loose what came. They

sung heartful upon the anonymous

with shame soulbent for the loved ones

missing. Some stopped and bent

choking in tearful lament for

a ring recognized. But always more

hands, more rings.

 

And the exhaustion of the bodies with badges

digging on, thinking to find the devil itself

into the rabbit hole

as medicine men shake rattles to stop the bodies from showing

down deeper they dig.

How many are buried into the abyss

generations of the abyss

without a Moses or Clint Eastwood to save them?

Not the Yanks dropping bombs over walls.

And just maybe the raids that dig the holes

come from foreign fingers and cash and sex and holes.

 

Each person pulled loose with a lostness

of past and identity like stray paragraphs

without the context of what surrounds them.

It is nonsense, each of them thinks but

somehow biblical, as if the seen world

were replaced by something akin to

Lucifer’s playground as the sun beats down

upon the topsoil.

 

He used to think tribal existence was wiped out with Manifest Destiny

and somehow, as he circles the widening gap in the earth

his gps to headquarters, he thinks, “I am part of a tribe too.”

And thus spited the land, spited everything he was against,

what he was for, because it made no difference to damn any god

for the mass graves that bed the planet

308 this time

279 in Durango

116 in Matamoros

227 in Srebrenica

7000 and plus and plus and plus and plus

In Mabanza

and each of us

the gift of moonlight and sunrise and pig scraps.

 

Some swollen light

something given back, offered to the earth

amid the digging of these

modern excavations.

 

-EE