The men at the street-side café
do not look up from their cards
until the old woman’s shadow
drips from their table.
Knuckle-bones for dice,
smoke coils from their coffee
like thin souls on the rise.
Black skirts scatter leaves,
birds pulse in broken trees,
birds explode at her voice:
Our dead are your dead,
turns her head to the tomb-niches,
to the flame-flickered portraits
of mothers and fathers.
Down the hill
children play Vasco da Gama
at the last of waves
still hissing tongues
that the world could never
have ended here.
Published in Page & Spine
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