Chiapas
By Gary Soto
There is the one who turns
A spoon over like a letter,
Reading the teeth-marks
Older than his own;
The one who strikes a match,
Its light flowering
In his eyes,
The smoke in his throat;
The one who opens the mouth
Of a dog to listen
To the sea, white-tipped
And blind, feel its way to shore.
At night
They walk in the streets,
The dust skirting their legs
Raw with lice
And the wind funneled
Through a doorway
Where someone might pray
For a loaf of good luck.
*
Somewhere the old follow
Their canes down
A street where the front
Pages of a newspaper
Scuttle faceless
And the three-legged dog hops home.
A door is locked twice
And flies ladder a scale of fish.
Somewhere a window yellows
From a lantern. A child
With fever, swabbed in oils
And mint, his face
Spotted like an egg,
His cry no different
Than the cry
That shakes the trees lean.
A candle is lit for the dead
Two worlds ahead of us all.
Copyright Credit: Gary Soto, “Chiapas” from Where Sparrows Work Hard (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Gary Soto. Reprinted with the permission of the author, www.garysoto.com.
Source: Poetry (January 1979)