The Children Are Crying

The children are crying to Tio Caiman:
''These are our streets'' ''The whole world is watching.''

It is as if they expect
Freedom to follow upon their request:

An answer that will not be, eventually,
A bullet.

Their voices are those of their parents'
Forty years complicitous.

But in the barrios of San Jose
Above the barranca

A parenthesis of tin shacks
Interrupts the gaze

Of a single, white-washed skyscraper:
The Banco National.

Lo Banco National is patrolled by armed guards: so that
The barrio is surveyed by straveling dogs;

So that: the legislature cannot find a copy of the Constitution,
So that: the deputies hang like sloths in the Corco trees.

Let us sell the gold beneath the hills to pay for money!
A tarantula crawls into his root,

The conquistador grips his sword
A bloodied cross.

When the cries reach the Pope
He curses Marx

For befriending Jesus, and restores the law of nature:
Cutting sugar-cane at two dollars a day.

The B-movie actor who brought Morning to America
Slides the bullets into the chambers.

The guns are held by the pasty palms
Of soldiers, their faces pulp-dark.

When they have raped the Nuns
They blow out the brains of the Jesuits,

Brains that have dared to imagine
That existence might scantify essence,

Or if a volcanic fault
Might swallow Lo Banco Nationale.

His bannas made safe
Tio Caiman slips beneath the murk

Leaving his children to cry:
"Whose streets?" Their streets.

"Whose eyes?" The eyes of those
who feign sleep.

Will Morgan, San Jose December, 2011