by Roger Aplon
A child weeps & her cries reverberate throughout the dingy warehouses,
makeshift barracks & swarming
extraction camps, it
ricochets across the desolate plains of west Texas & southern California &
southern Arizona & the mesas
of New Mexico.
A child weeps & his tears threaten to drown the tongue-tied Christians, Jews
& Muslims, they dampen dinner tables
in Portland, Maine &
Poughkeepsie, New York & St. Louis, Missouri & across the Rockies &
across the sea to Honolulu. Children weep &
parents weep &
a once-proud people cringes in the wake of what it has allowed & what it
has wrought & what it is to be
dishonored.
Between bouts of fear & trembling these kids are heard to ask ¿ Dónde está mi madre?
—¿Dónde está mi padre?—
¿ Dónde estoy?
‘Where Am I?’ rings off-key like a cracked bell—like a symbolic “liberty”
bell, cracked but still resonant, reminiscent
of what has been lost but might still be.
Roger Aplon has published thirteen books: one of prose poems & short fiction: Intimacies; twelve of poetry, including the recently published: Mustering What’s Left—Selected & New Poems—1976 – 2017 from Unsolicited Press. He lives in Beacon, N Y & publishes the poetry magazine: “Waymark – Voices of the Valley.”