Exile 1967
Leaving Home
Flamenco doll wound up,
spinning;
bewitching the child looking on.
A gift from Great-Grandfather,
fleeting;
sitting on a wheelchair,
half-smilingly musing,
What will become of the young?
Streets of confetti,
fairy-tale carriage,
Occupants showered with prismatic streams;
costumed dancers’ drumbeat sway,
Child’s last wave,
to the princesses’ vanishing realm,
at carnival.
Taxi speeds through the bowels of night,
before the eagle takes flight;
on the rollercoaster road,
past the deserted, campestral abode,
flanked by weeping palms.
The child’s cry shatters the dreadful silence
of inert souls,
“Papi, where is my home?”
Swallowed up by the thick, black void,
where generations once frolicked,
in the tall ancestral grass;
And Mambises once marched,
upon the fertile, blood-soaked land,
to victory.
