I.
It hasn’t changed. The serene 
green countryside reaches 
toward a cloudless sky, and this
land could be your land. 

II.
The oldest woman in town
trembles a bit remembering 
an unsettling glow lighting 
her childhood, but this
town could be your town.

III.
There’s a playground now 
on the peaceful street
where ghosts were born 
and legends linger, and this 
street could be your street.

IV.
The women in farmhouses
and tidy village homes kept 
the curtains drawn so the 
children wouldn’t see, but this 
home could be your home.

V.
The world comes in buses now. 
Tourists stagger through history,
pausing to catch their breath,
inhaling reassurance that this 
history will not be their history.

VI.
It hasn’t changed. The serene 
green countryside reaches 
toward a cloudless sky, and this
land may be your land. 

*A small city in Poland, better known by its German name, Auschwitz. 

Author’s Note: This year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camps by Soviet troops. 
“One Day in Oswiecim” was first published by the International Human Rights Art Fest.
                        

I have seen wondrous images ghost their way
toward a specter of truth or something like it 
 while bathed in trays filled with what 
might have been black magic and tiny bits 
of time passing. I have seen the merest traces 
of light prophesy darkening shadows 
beneath the safelight and I have tasted 
the slow teasing impressions gathering 
in the chemistry like revelations even as 
I watch and wait, and I have remembered
that this is the way revelation always
comes to me—not in pixelated flashes
of insight but in nine zones of emerging 
detail witnessed under a dim red glow.

First published in Third Wednesday.
                        

And in the end the Tarahumara are starshine.

Souls spent, the ancestors take their places                                                          
in the night sky capping the Copper Canyon, 
looking down on their people who are running 
still, fast and forever, up and along impossible 
canyon walls.

Like the stars, we look, too. We imagine we see 
the intricate striations that tell the stories of the 
ancient rocks, imagine that we’ve seen the secretive, 
unknowable people who escaped to the canyons 
centuries ago, eluding conquistadores, sidestepping 
missionaries and miners and slavers and us, to find refuge 
beneath incomprehensible ledges, to hoard what 
mysteries they know deep inside the unfathomable 
Barrancas del Cobre caves.

Like the Tarahumara glimpsed cliffside from the canyon’s rim 
or selling baskets and violins in the marketplace, 
we have known impenetrable walls and endless trails 
and deepest ravines, or so we tell ourselves. What we 
don’t say is that we suspect that these people we call primitive—
who might run one hundred stony, barefoot miles in a day 
to fete Father Sun and Mother Moon with music 
and peyote and dance—might be winning the race.

First published in Chiron Review.