Night Walk

Through Matamoros, close to midnight,
I walk …past bricks of a hundred-plus years …
And the bricks speak to me for I tell them to ….

Away from the bricks and back streets and dim lights,
I enter sharp yellow light and cars, cars for a mile, up and down one
Lit main street, cars of parents-given-to-wealthy young men and women,
And I know those drivers, and their parents are decades and bank accounts
Removed from their countrymen and countrywomen who near that busy and rich street,
Cross rivers, roads, fields, and die, and make it, and die and make it ….

A thousand miles west these same countrymen and countrywomen cross deserts,
Some make it, some die.

All these crossings for money, yes money, that the car drivers and their parents have and
Intend to keep, and the car drivers and their parents could give a shit about the
Crossing people, their people, but not their people …..

The bricks are behind, silent.

Now, I cross too, with papers, chance, fortune and
Want to be fair and ask myself, “Do you think parents and their young adults in cars, in say,
The middle or either side of Nebraska – that’s in the United States, not Mexico – spend even
A second on deaths of neighbors in US-run wars, or the thousands who made “the crossing,”
And now prepare cows and pigs and chickens, right down the road from the “good people of
Nebraska?”

Author’s note: This poem/work is several years old; for effect, read it aloud several times, get the pacing …and feel free to add/delete ….