Graduation Night

9:05 PM
Smoke from the night´s fire from the house next door
Toasting tortillas over the comal for the children who are hungry

Cloudy sky—it rained today for the first time
In the five months I´ve been here.

This girl, who sits on the porch with her hair done up
She is so pretty
She is the success store.

She sits pulling out the bobby pins she used to pin up her
Hair, long dark strong, for this day, this graduation day.

At 5:30 she woke up, got ready, went to the school, ate lunch with her family,
She sits here now in the still night air
Cool now
With crickets and every so often someone from the village passes by.

¨Buenas noches.¨
Blankets, candles, hot coffee.

She worked hard. She graduated from high school.
Like I said, she is nice, sweet, honest. Long black hair.

There are lights far out in the distance—a campfire?—the houses that
Dot these rolling hills of the Salvadoran landscape.

I want to smoke a cigarrete and drink and beer in a bar and talk about this with you,
So I write it down.

She has a sister and we sit chatting and they are so wonderful to me,
A strange here, a newby a nobody. A threat? A promise?

In San Salvador, in the cities, things change fast.
Murders on the news, gangs, Internet, worlds colliding. Pirates in Somalia?

Her friend came by this morning also wanting her hair done.
She has small feet, bondy with blue veins, the most patient woman.

A former seamstress, she cleans and cooks for a wealthy family in the pueblo.
Her mother makes all the tortillas because she says she can´t stand to see her daughters working.

One by one the lights are going out. The fire is still there. No stars. A breeze.

I remember I spent a night in the Dominican Republic with a friend who was quite poor and we woke up early and went swimming in a river next to a rice factor and then to the beach.

I wonder about this girl´s tomorrow and get anxious but then I realize she is beautiful and her friend is beautiful and these young women are the successes here in this village. As the lights go out maybe they should pull tose bobby pins out and go to sleep as the dogs bark and the rain falls drop by drop.

I sit here with my music and my words and I wish them peace. Sleep. Rest.
I wish them all the best in the world.

I have been proud of people before.
My sister, my mom, my father, my brother, my friends, myself. My president.

Tomorrow, the sun, the corn, the hills. The life of a maid in the city. The sugar cane grows. Hammocks swing unoccupied in the wind.

This is my success story. That they find a soft shady spot.
I wish them the wind through the trees because these young women are my compass
My soft grass, my blood, my hope,
My success story.

Saludos

Saludos


How are you? Thanks again for all the support.
I am making my life like one of those you see in the movies, the lost son vanished into soft silent Arabian women with dark eyes and deserts and dates and strong coffee
Served in white porcelain cups, coming back every other year for Christmas
Or something else important.

Or maybe I´ll disappear to Peru or El Salvador for years among thick tortillas
And rain and women wearing bright colors of wool and braided hair and men
Who work the land planting corn the same way as they have done for thousands of years.

Or in Africa amongst high hills and Serengeti plains
Or in Asia in cold mountain towers studying Buddhism
Or in India. I have always wanted to go to India!

I miss home. I miss easy.