I crossed an ocean too.
We were not running from bullets.
We were not important enough
to be political prisoners.
There was no war, I have
no visible shrapnel scars.
Only a recent calamity
that left my whole city in ruins,
that tore my house in two.
Two weeks after the earth shook
buildings
like toy maracas
father swayed against the door frame
in his faded yellow bathrobe
as if to say goodbye.
In the morning he choked
as mother spooned soft scrambled eggs
into his mouth.
Then his eyes rolled back in his head
and he stiffened in the chair.
Can I say we took him
to the hospital if the hospital
was barely standing? I can see
the shape made by the feather
stroke of blood that issued
from the corner of his mouth.
The sky lifted with the noise
of rescue helicopters.
We were not on them.
I was not on them.
I found another way across
the ocean. I took
what was offered and learned
to hide the sounds of hurt
from my ears. A précis
reveals the meaning
of the original but can it explain its value.
Years later I can't erase
the taste of guilt from my tongue, shake
this habit of always looking back.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.