A fossil in foam, five toes under a formed sole,
preserves the flight of a thousand border treks.

A layer of thermite and blood settles the right pad
of every hastily fled soul, a rusty preservation
of the ash of those who were enflamed.

Their left clod is encased with the dirt of broken roads,
the green of weeks of refuge in the forest from patrols,
the gray movement from villages to mountains and back.

At night they would mend and repair, knotting
broken y’s with twigs, rope threads, thatch,
anything that will last one more day.

The young’s heels are scuffed with the abrasions
left from the playful kicking parents endure
carrying them on their shoulders.

The old heels are full of the bristle
of slow moving donkeys led
by sons and daughters taking turns.

Under the shelter of grey canvas
their trek ends with fresh water,
food, a sturdy cot and new sandals.

The old plastic soles will rest in honor
on the mantle of their new hut,
ready for the next journey.

Tiananmen Square is a clean place today.
Everything is swept before it can
***** in the history of place.

No sign exists of the tanks that rolled,
the man in front of them,
the blood that flowed
like red sorghum seeds.

The cracked bricks
have been replaced
with new tera cotta tiles.

The first  memorial plaque
is invisible until you are
standing on top of it,
located at the Great Court
at the University of Queensland
4500 miles away.

IN MEMORY OF
THOSE WHO DIED IN TIENAMEN
SQUARE IN JUNE 1989,
its three lines read,
using the Aussie spelling.

In San Francisco  a 9.5 foot statue
modeled after the original
Goddess of Democracy
is located at the edges of
Chinatown in a park of
concrete and manicured trees.

On the anniversary Chinese police
put out temporary signs in  
in the center of the Square warning
DO NOT LAY MOURNING WREATHS.

Banner displayers, victory gesturers,
those doing solitary hunger strikes,
are detained, questioned, disappear.

On the Party web the students are scrubbed.
The only sign of blood that lingered
in the summer air that June morning
is a  photo of the lone soldier who died
in the “counter revolutionary turmoil”.

The plugged in young are unaware.
They only know that the Party
reserves the right of your total erasure.

Just as the memories of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
are vanishing horrors in the Japanese soul,
Tiananmen is not worthy of ghostly echoes,
or even the lies printed in every official history.

Truth is the secret kept dark by the victors,
it’s locked in prisons and dark closets,
it speaks with the voice of exile

In the dark light and smoggy air,
only dogs and the grieving blind
know the true scent of Tiananmen
hidden under the shiny tera cotta.

In the stillness of a teacup morning
in Amsterdam a crowd with yellow stars
query each other, a collapse of
suitcases and stuffed pillow cases
huddled under a gas lamp at a corner square,
while those in the stories above slowly turn away.

A few days before the yellow stars were
twenty-one children with backpacks
dreaming of a long field trip to Deventer.
The school picture they posed for would
be discovered fifty-four years later
under the frame of an oil painting
of the freedom monument in Dam Square.

Sieg, wandering in the fog of Bergen-Belsen
his classmates part of the mound
of George Rodgers well published frieze,
the only one of them not camera shy,
made it back to his mother and sister,
forever now a New York Jew.

Before them the square hosted
the frail bones of yellow star seniors,
their children depositing them
silently and hurriedly under
the hiss of the lamp shutting
off from the night watch.

Daan sewed the photo
of his yellow star grootmoeder
on a wooden chair staring into the sun
into  the lining of his jacket
and felt its pressure on the day
when the train arrived for him too.

The freight train to the Westbrook stockyard
the stench of manure, ****, fetid hay,
the old scent of cattle mingling with man,
fear embedded in every board,
was, as always, on time.

On her last ride on the Arkansas river, 
she watched the world turn crooked, 
all the hickory shading yellow, 
their leaf tears forming 
sunny arrows in the flow, 
nuts falling in the glide, 
bringing smoker memories 
of hams cooked under their roast, 
red maples tapped for their syrup, 
the unharvested loblolly pines
dropping their branches 
almost in caress, one last kiss.

Inside she could feel the cross 
go slanted in her golden bedroom,
envision her daughter taping 
together the amber pages of their Bible
turned to Luke 8:24, felt the Arkansas’ lull,
her in breath becalming the storm inside,
while shedding a tear for her gray mutt
with a rill of white running up his snout
and down his belly, staring at the spot
where the burned ashes of her bedding 
would be buried.

Trupie Pole, this Field of Death
is called in the old Slavic tongue,
shares its grief with the ruins
of the Catholic Church,
its relics long since relocated
to the hollowed knots of oaks
that populate a crooked forest.
Stick scarecrows, their bag heads
floating phantoms, protect the border.

Even the trees grow stunted where
the ground was soaked with blood,
limbs swaying towards each other
like separated twins begging
uselessly for reunion.  
Each blasted vein and half leaf
still echoes with the shriek,
the soil still leaks rust when trod,
memories of false sanguine
still glisten on overcast mornings,
and the howl of fog never dissipates,
while rumors of griffon vultures
returning from the dead
to paw for a taste of the catacombs
below are abundant as gnats.

In a wooden wagon the grandchildren
of blood huddle in desperate acts
of remembrance and procreation
ignoring the old woman with a babushka,
and somber dress fertilizing the field
with  tears for the thousandth time
for the sleeping twin under her boots.

The rain creates its own ballet
starting with a lone figure on a bridge
holding an umbrella in the fog
splashing teardrops with his feet,
doing jetes over the larger puddles,
until the wind inverts his shade,
plies turning to pirouettes,
approaches cascading to the portal
and the head of the street,
dancing to a cityscape beyond.

At the last turn they meet cute,
their outward canopies entangling
rib to rib, shadow to shadow,
a plastic bag covering hair and
half her face, soggy groceries
nursed to her chest, an oversized
purse dangling her wrist, pulling
her down, falling, wishing for
something, someone, anything
to stop the descent, the crash.

He catches her in perfect repose,
umbrellas twirling the pavement,
as he slowly lifts her to him just a
breath and heartbeat away,
their hands touching, a thousand
raindrops pulsing on and in them.

Her parasol dances away from her
over the edge into the swirl below,
his caught before flight is vigorously
shaken to form.  He stuffs fallen
apples and pears into the pockets
of his rain jacket.  She discreetly
stashes a box of tampons into
her coat’s hidden lining. The umbrella
is their only shelter as she holds
it over them while he carries her
in his arms to the nearest cover,
a bodega with a green awning.  

At the corner of the drizzling mist
a mother swaddles her boy
in the hems of her rain dress.
Unprotected singles cover
their heads with open hardcovers
or purchases clenched in plastic bags.
Couples step in unison huddled
under their vinyl domes.
It’s all a parade under black and white,
a synchronized rainbow of attitude,
adding  to the grand Romantic ballet
of bending, riding, stretching, gliding,
darting, jumping and turning to and fro.

The finale has the last drop crying
to the pavement, to the street,
washing the asphalt in its clarity,
a lachrymose river flowing down drains,
the mechanical traffic dispersing
the  rest in butterfly waves that
sends the ensemble to the edges,
leaving the coryphees alone, apart,
staring at each other in the evaporation,
waiting forlornly for the first trickle
to return and kiss their skin with joy.

The Mayas of Colemnar Viejo for the last twilight hours
of early May exist in mature thoughts, statues unable to address
the questions designed to unseat their repose from  
spectators marching  into shadows.  By night they will
know the answers that will secret their lives, grateful for
Ermita de Remedios for the revelation and insight that will
allow them to play until the miracle appears. Their mothers
will bless them, remembering their time when it was their duty
to stay still enough to hear God breathe and acknowledge
the old beehive for pollinating wildflowers for their throne.

The Mayas flower with the secret whispers passed down
from grandmothers to mothers to daughters from before
when Maia echoed to a month, when she was the very flow
of the vegetable world, the monthly blood, Pleiades nights,
the first fingers of cotton lavender, narcissus, spurge,
and hyacinth poking the spring bloom with shy joy, until
adult enough to be a proper escort for  mute child queens.
Her aura surrounds the Mayas, a halo echoing earth, sky
and sun, the unnoticed slow revolve of all repose
only noticed in the dissolve from night to day.

The tapestries are heirlooms: two borrowed from
a photographer’s closet, one unfolded in the attic,
another a dust collector hung to cover a wall crack,
and the last, depicting a  tangle of horsed knights
in a tropical land on a royal leopard and lion hunt,
ancient enough to have kissed the walls of twenty houses
and become familiar with a dozen Last  Suppers.
Every house in Colemnar Viejo blessed with a nina
has a tapestry with a true or mythic history
suitable enough to be a Maya dreamscape.

The Mayas are serenaded by a brass band attired in paunchy black and white
that parades from pose to pose playing canciones praising  their beauty and style.
They wear relics carefully preserved and handed down: white petticoats
and shirts, Manila shawls of celestial yellow, blue heaven, weeping black,
vibrant Spanish carnations, and pure white, eloquently tied in the back.
Clustered around the town’s center the Mayas can see all the others
solemnly carved in silence and slow time, know that the basilica beyond
houses forever the crying ****** and the anguished Christ surrounded
in golden murals and feel the sadness  that in minutes the frozen
can only watch them freely move, dance and play.