Andean Chant

Praise with our sweetest bitterness this:
we are the last of our kind to live these ways
Shush now and do not tell the children they'll forget
cataract and moon.

We are this place as none shall be ever again;
our trails only now grow closed the first time.
You may not tell the children they'll forget
cataract and moon.

Already they poke for our song fires and our fathers' tools
and take their beauty from houses we cut in stone.
The children will certainly laugh continuously to forget
cataract and moon.

And those who escape to the packed calles in Lima
to turn in their cobbed fingers the pale silver coins
must find in them if they can the undying lines of
cataract and moon.

Let the highest places become places of lost words, then,
and let the night sky become all the purer unviewed,
the same cold stars that storied to our hands and eyes
cataract and moon.

You chosen to live counting the things of others,
do not tell them any of our stories when they come.
Remember how we did not tell the children to forget
cataract and moon.

First published in "Seeing the End of the World" by Racoon Press