Looking North

Looking North


am up much too early today
not to watch the sun rise
but because of some restlessness
some desire to move from
this one spot where the earth


is parched, where water
hides beneath the cracked earth.
The sheriff of Kenedy county
leads journalists on a trail
from the Rio Grande north


to a small highway. The tourist
spots are dry holes near scrub
mesquite, sand dunes with rattle
snakes. He points out each
depression in the earth, each


depression that once held dry
bones in a dry country. “Nine
people so far this year,” he says.
“Illegal aliens walking from
so many miles south to some


north they've never seen.” They
used to drown in the river, now
their skin shrivels as they walk,
turns darker, their tongues dry.
They lie down beneath dunes and die.


Here in this withered borderland
no oasis offers relief, no ranchers
put water out as they do food
for ranging cattle. I stand beneath
a bright night sky, looking up


at stars undimmed by city lights
and gaze across a barren land. I do
not see a woman fall, posed between
two dwarf trees, hear the rattle
of a snake, of a last breath of air,


only, some small cough, some
desire that floods across the border,
some search for life, to take and drink,
to kneel and stretch up and out. This
is the end, the last days of pilgrimage,


blisters on face and back, feet cracked
like patches of hard clay. Jose y Maria,
what child must come, what rescue
from a dry land, what hope for clear
water and the soft brush of cool breezes.



H. Palmer Hall

Posted over on The Literary World of H. Palmer Hall
(Originally published in Amarillo Bay and Pecan Grove Review )