Sojourner

The train bored through the corn like a weevil
leaving no trace of the sojourn. You watch
birds hop across the drooping leaves like scribes reading
the charts of time, and there in a tear in the green
and yellow, a red tractor idles like a slow burning coal.
And speaking of fire, that man we saw, brother,
a man burning on TV, skin melting, somewhere
between Africa and Lampedusa. Flaming
in the brow of a boat. Emblem? Ship’s figurehead?
You turn from the image say: death will find you
how it wills, and as it wills. The chemo in you is fire too.
And in the end, in someone’s heart, we burn.
An immigrant I try to read a people here but I cannot.
Those I might have, have been erased in all but place-names.
Mighty nations reduced to fit the small malice
of a wicked conquerors heart. And so, what
will not yield to the poet’s gaze will be overwritten.
Even the brown earth will crumble to reveal
the red soil of my homeland, blood on the outside of the body.
It comes fast this yearning for ground and loss,
sure as ink rides the sway of paper
I will find you brother, find home.