May 2022
Bio Note: I am a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. For several decades, I and my faithful traveling companion (a.k.a., knapsack) Rocinante have been traveling through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth, and doing literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. My poetry and narratives have been published in over 300 journals on six continents; and 20 collections of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Caribbean Interludes (Origami Poems Project, 2022).
Perquín
During the war years the military forbade foods & medicines to pass the military forbade teachers & doctors to come Only the Red Cross could cross the line You, the women fought time & again to break the soldier-line you were beaten, imprisoned the line broke before you would You, the people of this village formed farming collectives & trained each other to teach the children to heal the sick In the dark mountain night you did not dare to light a candle to sit on your porch & watch the stars The constant fear of a knock in the blackness The constant reality of your dead neighbors in the morning roadside Many days the bombs fell burning huge patches on the treed mountainsides burning your skin Many days you had to hide The cemetery— the nameless, dateless turquoise crosses roll up & down with the land as far as the eye can see In the dusk I stood there gazing across the vastness shuddering at the war vision I walked home watching the blood fade from the sky run beyond the mountain horizon
Originally published in Impetus (women only) – no. 6, Spring 2000
Fraying
I gaze upon the dusk-sky carpet woven of fall-painted clouds & emerging stars
embossed with Stealth contrails slowly fraying with a soft north-west breeze
Those Stealth threads weave far to the east
Rolling a carpet of fiery red & blinding white bombs
Rolling rolling across the barren late-autumn plains of Afghanistan
The wind whistles across those plains around mountains & through valleys & caves
Icy winds of approaching winter whirlwind the ashen & cinder-black fraying
shredding remnants of a child’s a woman’s an elder’s life
Ashes that fall
Cinders that glow
Blood that spills
Upon a carpet of green black, gold & silver
woven by the Seven Sisters of an elite Alliance
A glittering carpet to smother to smother
how many lives how many lives
A shimmering silver & gold oily-black dollar-green carpet
to which most of America-Asia-Africa refuse to weave a single thin thread
A carpet splattered with oxidizing blood singed with searing cinders
soiled with dry ashes fraying
fraying in the winds of war
©2022 Lorraine Caputo
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