Listening Poem by Jean Marie Ruiz

I hear them crossing black rivers,
smothering their babies.
The women weave blankets
from stained glass.
Their children change colors.

I cannot answer the cries of infants
forgotten in grocery carts,
hospital rooms, and plane wrecks.
I have small words
for misplaced fidelities.

I listen to the
languid ripening of tomatoes,
the furtive prolonging of an eclipse.
Women revert to other languages.
They tell stories of enduring men
sweating in corn fields,
tentative boys reading under mango trees,
of morning prayers
and thousand year old walls,
unceasing interrogations
and roadside graves.

I hear my grandfather's unrelenting hands
fashioning the head of Christ from stone.
There were afternoons
of sun and scorpions
in Mexico.
I hear my father say
that he is forgetting history.
The train to Texas was deliberate,
like a pulse.