For I Cry No More Poem by RIC BASTASA

what tears are? i have known more than
one, shaped like a cone, fluid, washing the sticky
part of my sorrow, like a flood in the river
taking every driftwood every foul carcass
of depression.

father says a man grows and he becomes big enough
for tears.
and soon he grows much bigger than the old tree of
the ancestors, a genealogy with roots spreading,
beating through the layers of a tribe's history.

like those who died ahead, with all the shaking moments
houses falling, and burning ashed,
one arrives at the point of the threshold of tolerance,
no stab of sorrow pierces the heart
there is this constant use of pain, unattached, ineffective,
and tears have no use anymore.