POEM
The Dust Covers My Shoes
They demonstrate against Pinochet now,
1984
Among the people marching a mother
with her son aged twelve
& the police arrest him
take him away, a boy
aged twelve,
the mother in bitterness, in terror
at what will happen
In Ludlow, 1914, an elderly man
goes out to face the militia
a white flag in his hand
to ask for protection
for women & children of the embattled strikers
“Come close” they say,
“Come closer” as he obeys,
they take close aim and
shoot him down
I have seen the faces of the mothers
in Vietnam, the children, the old men,
the woman
holding a dead child in her arms,
or
a dying child,
their homes leveled,
fields burned, driven
into camps
I knew two little girls in Riga,
Galya and Bella (& Bella was very beautiful)
with whom
I played one summer & 2 older women, my father’s sisters
forced to dig their own graves
& many, many
other faces I’ve seen—old men
leading little children, bewildered, by the hand,
the way to the gas-chambers
& 2 young people,
very much in love, saying goodbye to each other
at the cattle-cars—they looked like Byzantine angels,
& the white-bearded patriarch
beaten to the ground & raising his fist to
heaven,
& a small boy-skeleton
dancing to entertain the Nazi soldiers,
dancing
for his life
I have seen them & the trustfulness
of beautiful boys & girls with rucksacks
on their backs, as if they were going to be
“resettled,” to work in gardens!
I shall not forget them,
the smoke is
in my throat, the dust covers my shoes.
It is a flute made of
their bones I use to accompany
whatever song I sing
It is the butterfly
who cannot speak,
the breath of those not given time to
form their syllables
that cuts my breath
It is those voices
choked back that make my voice so heavy,
that whiteness
a weight of ice that gives forth fire
"The Dust Covers My Shoes" from Cloudless at First by Hilda Morley (Kingston, Rhode Island: Moyer Bell, 1988) Copyright © 1988 by Hilda Morley. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Source: Cloudless at First (Moyer Bell, 1988)
