Hanging Clothes on the Lines

I look up.

And there, are the lines

green leaves beyond

under a background of limpid, blue sky

A ball of a wet cotton panties weighs in

the cup of my palms

I give “the tent,” in his teasing words, a shake

free the global form

to let it soar like

a white dove above my head

Its wingspan obscures the barlike lines

Above them green leaves

And a sea of limpid, blue sky

Once long ago,

Standing in a prison yard

My mother looked up to the soaring walls of metal bars

Behind it thousands of emaciated skeletons

Ghostlike, of men

for a familiar shape

What did she expect to see

So far above

Thousands of what seemed to be sunken male faces  

What seemed to be limbs

Of lost souls

What seemed to hang

Like monkeys on black bars

craving for one sliver of sunlight

one breathful of cool air

one last view of a limpid, blue sky

But suddenly she cried out

“Look!” and at the tip of her upraised finger

At the end of that straight line connecting her little index

to far beyond I saw

nothing

But her eyes shone with hope

And her breath became shallow as she whispered

“Your father’s shorts, there”

and it seemed that I, too, spied him

A skeleton more familiar in shape

and dear to us

Than the thousands others

And it seemed that the lines around him

were hugging him for us

And it seemed that the distance

from the tip of my mother’s index finger to

the dark cell above where thousands of men

Were hanging like monkeys on display

Like monkeys in a forgotten zoo

There was no separation at that moment

And it seemed that we were

One family again

under the limpid, blue sky

4/15/2018