2
Virus sets fire after fire blazing the eco of the monarch trees kissing the clouds
The root of eco means home home once knew and grew alongside of ancient
Sequoias who mediated sun and rain and song.
But the children disappear somewhere
And the forests forever scorched
Virus asks what matters
The children nick-named the cage—
The Freezer
Lay on freezing floors
Try to sleep
On
Concrete
When
The
Children
Cannot be.
Human?
3
It is not over. Border Control pulled the children out of their parents’ arms.
Children stolen for private prisons to boom. Seven Indigenous children
died inside the prisons. ACLU reunited a few families. It is not over.
The parents are looking for them, year after year looking for them.
Who counts the missing? Reporters fail to find a paper-trail.
No. database. to count the Disappeared in America.
Yesterday’s news. No longer newsworthy.
But they have stories—real cliffhangers.
The child no longer remembers her eyes.
Not even grandmother’s or grandfather’s,
or big sister’s or brother’s, or cousin’s.
Lungs of sorrow catch the mourning
molecules fueling Virus.
4
The children laugh at us. The children hear what we will not.
They ask me. Auntie, you can’t hear that? What about now? Now?
Can you hear the fiesta near those old woods by the old meeting house?
We can hear those ghosts singing and dancing for—Maria,
the great great niece of Uncle Lucas. She is about to walk.
Graduating with Honors from UC Hastings College of Law
in the heart of the Tenderloin in Immigration Law.
Her parents lived to see her walk.
Listen to her words.
Forty years ago her parents crossed the Rio Grande before sunrise
but in those days—in those days on the side of mercy—the others knew
brought the people water, food, blankets and a change of clothes.
What if our children made it to their thirteenth birthday?
Were they not born to dream? A lawyer or a judge or a chef, or a poet.
The children could have dreamed to celebrate with Maria.
To see her walk so the ancestors could live.
Maybe the children dreamed the old revolutionary road
unblocking the path to that old meeting house
in the woods. There once was a path
to make it, to give back.
Copyright © 2022 by Penina Ava Taesali. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 5, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.