poem 18: On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

I hear my city at war,
or maybe I’m hearing
my own heart like a war

with its million ammunitions,
million missing limbs, its slow
roaring movement through loss.
I was the barrel of a shotgun.

I was the wrong way out of town.
I was a lone moving animal,
trying to find the door to your house.

In times like this I try to ignore
the numbers, the body counts,
the orphaned young. But this war
makes me a listener so I understand

the crashing, my body moving:
a mistake. Let me warn you:
I bring the hurricanes, the forest

fires, the non-God fearing baptisms of the earth
and they take me in their arms like a familiar stranger.
As a moving funeral in this drunken city,

I leave bright trinkets in my wake.
As a moving funeral in all the other cities,
I leave the already worn land, the dry brush, the barely lit

match. I leave the ghost towns behind,
later drive past the washed out houses,
the burnt branches of that mountain.

I wish I could say those skeleton lands
have never moved me.

-marlo barrera

june-september 2010