In this city the Church had dominion over the dead,
but the dead would not stay buried. 
They rose up out of the ground 
when the river overflowed and the ground turned to water. 
Fevers, vapors, and miasmas circulated,
the air so humid it was another form of water.
Pale, wide, and muddy, the river loomed, 
and the earth opened up, spilling out pestilence.

It’s a wonder that anyone remained
after the floods and epidemics, 
the storms and hurricanes,
but the city was hard to leave once its charms ensnared you
like those shimmering gossamer webs of sunlight
that hang over the heavy magnolia leaves
after a rain clears the late afternoon
and the sky turns pink. In old, high-ceilinged rooms
with their heavy crown moldings,
fans mimic a breeze, and the rows of shotgun houses
are swept by breezes, front to back.

A repass outside a funeral home after a burial
spills its exuberance onto the street.
People are drinking and swaying 
to the blaring euphonies of a brass band
in free-form improvisation.
Death and sadness are right there,
but a bright band of frenzy
has trapped the despair and contained it,
and the only notes we hear are those of joy.
                        

	Memorial to the victims of Peru’s internal armed conflict 1980-2000 
	by Lika Mutal, Dutch-born Peruvian sculptor, 
	installed in Campo de Marte, Lima, Peru
		
After such conflict, 
there is only this quiet space,
not a bridge, but a separation, like a moat,
between what cannot be, and what is.

Past a grassy knoll, in the heart
of the labyrinth’s circuit,
sits the ancient, jagged stone of Mother Earth
in a pool formed by the spill of water 
forever flowing from her rocky eye.

The twisting journey of reflection
leads each soul in single file
along the path of collective memory
bordered by thousands of identical stones.

Here every eye-shaped stone
is inscribed with a name and date,
even if names and dates are a way
not to remember, but to forget 
what part in the fight each one took.

Those strangers with dark, wrinkled faces
and bowler hats, their legs bowed
as if they’d just stepped off a ship
into the fogs of the coastal capital,
and not traveled down from distant highlands
where the air is thin and cold and hard to breathe,
and legacies of violence live on side by side. 

It wasn’t so much what they’d come to find 
as what they’d come to lose—
that instinctive fear, like an animal’s, 
giving off a harsh scent.
Knowing that their grief 
at last can speak its name.