by Carol Alexander
Called home, to an acre of torn grass.
Bloodstains on a path, a lingering smell of burn.
Tell your children: The hilltop skeletons
are carvings by the hand of a god,
the sweet-faced cattle couldn’t be ours.
Say: There never was a house of thatch or cows
or a baby brother with bat-black curls,
that everything before this was a firefly dream.
If the young protest, put on your faraway eyes.
Praise this fetid wind as though the breath of sanctity.
See the houses roofed with plastic tarps.
Freshly blinded in one eye, this old man cannot know
his purloined cattle anyway. Today there is no milk,
just the complacent clang of temple bells. Why return at all.
Describe the nauseous smuggling boat,
the stench of men who married your flesh by turns
in the darkness of the fishy hold.
Tell it to the radio so we can hear.
Don’t give your second name. Death just might be listening.
Let’s cook a mess of whatever has washed ashore,
toss the bones in the hole of the latrine.
Patch a sarong from rags made supple by someone’s tears.
Kill your daughter’s worms with oils of the cajeput tree.
Let us listen in, walk three times around the shallow graves.
Carol Alexander‘s poetry can also be found in numerous print and online publications including J Journal, The Common, and Canary. She is a writer in the field of educational publishing and has authored books for children and adults alike, including her most recent, Environments (Dos Madres Press, 2018).