Jesus at the Monoloco

So many choices on a hot Antigua night—
platos fuertes, nachos, entradas, ensaladas, postres, bebidas.
Jesus makes his selection
and the local crowd drinks Gallo beer.
He remembers the Egyptian Sphinx
on the beer maker’s tomb
next to crypts for the city’s poor
stacked eight high in rows of thirty or more.
The words of the prophet are written on the tenement halls.

The yearly rent?
100 quetzales

If you can’t make it
they bust open your grave,
throw your body into the city dump.
Population explosion is the explanation—
No room at the inn.

Dinner at the Guatemala City Dump

The chicken truck has not arrived
so ten-year-old Carlos hasn’t eaten today
His father is dead—stepfather, aunts don’t want him
His world is the dump
His brown eyes worry its horizon for the chicken truck

Black buzzards are everywhere
clustered like congregants on an overhanging slab
motionless in the leafless branches of the jacaranda tree
perched atop crucifixes at el cemeterio La Verbena
Red eyes fixed on the guajeros below, they wait for their chance
at maggot-laden beef and not-quite rotten potatoes

I shade my eyes, pull my t-shirt to my nose to shut out the stench
of methane and sulfur and watch as a long yellow truck lumbers
down the dirt road—Taco Bell time
Older guajeros run to place a palm along its side.
Carlos holds back, knows his place
The truck rears up and he watches as the limber ones climb
the cascading boxes, their bodies and the trash
one continuous tumbling motion. There is plenty today
so it’s easy to be patient, but his stomach rumbles
as he waits his turn

At Pangea Antigua, elbows resting on crisp white linen,
I idly fork morsels of filet mignon, avocado mashed potatoes,
asparagus steamed to perfection
The jalapeños béarnaise glides down my throat
in one exquisite motion that, for a moment,
erases the image of Carlos dining amid the trash

The Blind Madre

In the alleyways of the barrio, families who once breathed
El Altiplano’s mountain air now divide themselves into blocks
of corrugated steel and inhale the sulfur and methane that oozes
from the Guatemala City dump. They left hoes and shovels
on the plateaus of Quezaltenango to squat—tenants without land,
farmers without fields—on decades of stratified waste.

The names of the barrio sectors imply promise—
La Libertad, La Paz, La Esperanza—
but reality is a soiled mattress in La Esperanza,
where blind Petronilla draws her eight children to her side
and waits in darkness for the husband who will, one more time,
pummel her body until the stain of a thousand pomegranates
spreads beneath her paper-thin skin.
Afterward, the man of the house will snarl
at Juan Carlos, Silvia, Luis, Edgar, Jesus,
Santiago, Gladys and little Petronilla, as,
one by one,
they drop curtains across the wells of their dark brown eyes.

Dios te ama

Gabriela sits on the sidewalk across from la Guarderia’s entrance,
crisp blue jersey and denim skirt contrasting with the sagging white plastic
that covers her barrio home. Her Mary Janes dangle over the gutter
where torn coffee cups and bits of paper drift in brown water.
Ragged laundry sways above a patched-together tin roof.
Across the street, glue sniffers crash in a corner, eyes glazed,
doped-up smiles on baby faces, but she looks past them

to a group of girls dressed in identical plaid skirts and white blouses.
As they approach, they glance at her, then whisper
as they disappear through la Guarderia’s rust-colored gate.
A gaunt brown and white cat peers out from a nearby doorway
and looks the other way as the guard slides the gate shut.
A moment later, like spent petals of the tumbergia plant,
laughter drifts over
the wall that separates the school from the barrio.
Gabriela stares at the gate and fingers a strand of dark brown hair
before slipping through the curtained doorway of her home,
past a wall where faded black letters proclaim:
Dios te ama.

The Flight of Cuatro Ojos

Oh cuatro ojos, what do you see in the barren landscape
of the Guatemala City dump? High above this forty-acre ravine,
can you make out the addict’s syringe,
the dinner rolls from Kentucky Fried Chicken,
the soiled toilet paper from Hotel Antigua?

Do you watch, with interest, the guajero’s child
who trudges each day to sift the waste of millions
for plastic her mother will sell for a few quetzales?

Which of your four eyes keeps a check
on the vultures that circle above her head,
on the still-moist condoms beneath her feet,
on the headless dolls she gathers, with gratitude, to her chest?

Cuatro ojos, it seems, are not enough to take in the child of the guajero—
un corazon not ample enough to hold the ache of her existence.

Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō

On a gray November morning, we gather—
Nipponzan Myohoji nuns and monks in saffron robes,
Veterans for Peace in black and white, and the rest of us—
to walk single file for twelve miles bearing banners for peace.

With a pewter-colored Maine sea to our left, we journey
past shuttered Grange halls, past summer homes with yards
ringed by gold-capped fence posts, past bungalows wrapped
in peeling clapboards, past Home-and-Garden greenscapes.

Brown oak leaves spiral seaward as we connect
with each other, the passersby, the road,
the hands raised in windows and doorways,
the mothers whose gleeful children see only a parade.

An ancient sky blends everything into a single expanse
of shuffling feet, fluttering flags, chanting voices,
rustling grass, honking horns and, above it all,
a white dove rising on a wind-whipped banner.

Over asphalt, cracked and smooth, we continue past tawny fields
speckled with cattails and guardrails draped with withering rose hips.
Baptist church bells toll a welcome as our feet mark the cadence
of the Japanese drums. Over and over, we repeat our mantra:

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…

In this, we bring the essence of the universe to a single question:
If, in the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was God,
what is this word? How does it explain strafing gunfire, roadside bombs?
Pakistani boys scrambling for ice at Chota Lahore relief camp?
Kabul’s street kids hawking chewing gum for twenty cents a pack?
Children throwing grenades and donning suicide vests in Kirkuk?
Corpses of the unknown lying in wait in a Baghdad morgue—
No. 5060, with a bullet to the right temple,
No. 5061, with a bruised and bloated face,
No. 5062, with a tattoo that reads, “Mother, where is happiness?”
No. 5071, with eyes open, as if remembering what had happened?

Like the lotus, I seek to bear, simultaneously, seed and flower,
to feel the heartbeat of the poor, the exploited, the desperate and dying,
to walk and send my lonely voice aloft into this struggling world.
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…

The Photographs in My Dreams

With gratitude to Jim Harney, for the words and photographs that filter the message of this poem. Jim was artist-in-residence for Posibilidad, a Bangor, Maine, based nonprofit organization that seeks to put a face to the suffering U.S. economic and political policies cause to the poor around the world. Jim died on Dec. 26, 2008.


Apparitions in the dark hold me hostage to stories of children who roam
garbage heaps and play in playgrounds laced with uranium-depleted sand.
Baby-faced boys heft AK-47s and stare at me with vacant bravado,
brace themselves, arm in arm, like buddies in a beer hall, as if their youthful
solidarity could protect them from the forces that stole their birthright of joy.

Guatemalan women file silently past in striped skirts, embroidered blouses,
shawls draped over shoulders, hair upswept into elaborate headdresses.
Their faces are full of beauty, arms laden with small wooden crosses
emblazoned with the names of the martyred. Their gaze forms an inquisition,
so I turn, burrow into sheets of cotton, pull the quilted comforter beneath
my chin and mutter a fretful sigh before drifting again among women

who strap babies to their breasts and turn their tired eyes to me,
an American mother, who, like them, wants most of all to keep her children
safe. I am unable to ignore the pleading in their dark brown eyes,
the resignation on faces too used to injustice to hope for anything more.

Night after night, una madre de los desaparecidos, crystalline complexion framed by brilliant white kerchief,
stares at me from the wells of her eyes. An icon of desirability,
she has little to offer those who might love her—
no joyful receipt, no hopeful trust,
not even resistance. She is the face of El Salvador’s outrage,
yet she does not weep or rage. The grip of her expression
ripples through my slumber. Finally, I break away

and, with relief, smile at an elderly woman who sits quietly on a wooden bench,
arthritic hands folded on her aproned lap. She leans against a stone wall;
perhaps it offers a cool respite from the Chiapas heat. She is my grandmother,
seated in my childhood kitchen. The lines of her face tell a story,
but it is not my grandmother’s story. I frown, until her smile shows me
there’s reason for hope. I weep with shameful gratitude.

Remember the martyrs left behind in the jungles of Guatemala. Presente!
Remember those fallen victim at the wall of death along the US-Mexican border. Presente!
Remember the undocumented, decapitated by el monstro de hierro in the Arizona desert. Presente!

If a homeless migrant can feed a gringo on the streets of Arriaga, what is not possible?
If an Iraqi dentist can clean an American’s teeth in Baghdad, what is not possible?
If the photographs of a single man can give voice to the voiceless, what is not possible?
If a God of the living could fill us all with the courage to act, what could be possible?

Look into the eyes of the children. Feel the anguish in the gaze of the madres.
As the shutter opens on the heart of their resistance, open your own eyes
to the stories behind the photographs. In them lies the hope of the excluded.

At the Food Cupboard

We stand, bodies touching in the too-small anteroom,
feeling the blast of cold each time someone enters.
We laugh at the awkwardness of this crush waiting
for a door to open, for a line to form,
for questions to be asked or orders to be given:

What’s your name?
Do you have your card?
Sign here.

The minutes tick on. I avoid eye contact. What would they think
if they knew I was here not to get, but to give food away?
They grow restless and, after a while, someone complains—
You’d think they’d open the door a couple minutes early on such a cold day.

Murmurs of agreement. Stories begin.
Of the time a woman was scolded at a soup kitchen—
When you see a piece of paper on the floor, pick it up.

Of the time a man was stopped in a food cupboard hallway—
You’re not supposed to be here.

Since when did she own the halls, he wants to know. Says he felt
like plastering her. He tightens his lips, stares defiantly
at the still-closed door, and the others applaud with their laughter.

When the door opens, I murmur an apology, step to the head of the line,
wonder what they think of my eavesdropping. They shuffle along,
leaning on walkers and canes, oxygen tubing attached to nostrils,
faces weathered by life. Patiently, they fall into line, loosen threadbare jackets, remove caps. They are the old, the infirm, the young with their young.
They wait alone, with a partner, with families, friends.
Silently, they sign in, take a ticket, keep moving and accept bags of groceries,
chunks of USDA cheese and a frozen chicken. Their eyes are downcast
until I ask, Can I carry that for you?

They smile with a gratitude too deep for such a simple gesture.

I haul their groceries to Caravans filled with waiting neighbors,
to rusty junkers and Chevies loaded with the detritus of their lives.
As we walk, I ask how they’re doing.
They drop bits of their existence into mine—
a heart condition, back surgery, exhaustion,
how hard it is to grow old.
I am touched by their openness, by the need
we all have to tell our stories,
by their quiet resignation
to life on someone else’s terms.

It is the first time the tiny woman beside me has come here.
She turns to me, and I am struck by the life in her eyes.
There is no sign of the bitterness I was privy to earlier.
So eager to believe in the goodness of the outstretched hand,
all she can say is, I didn’t know there was a place like this.

I want to share in her joy, affirm her thankfulness, but the best I can manage
is a Happy Holidays as I set the bags carefully on the back seat of her car.