3:00 pm
Old Woman
@
Dainzú
5
Sandpaper wind
polishing the land
erasing its identity
as barefoot
over dust and stone
the old woman
feasts her heart
on a banquet of song.
A rag-bag her body
stitched together
by memories and bone.
6
She shows me fear
in these grey shadows
dancing their dust
beneath carved rocks.
7
Abandoned now,
visited only by ghosts,
this resurrected ball park.
Buried beneath their stones
its heroes,
the men who wooed her.
I look at carved faces.
Which one captured
her flowering heart,
pierced it with an arrow,
and scarred her name
forever
letter by letter
on the face of this rock
?
rogermoorepoet 
It’s also a part of the survival pattern, I think. When one is living on the edge … each day brings its own tragedies … and joys. Sometimes mere survival is a joy.
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The description probably does not apply to the existing culture, but in these ancient meso-American peoples I feel a reserve, a stubbornness and a dogged determination. I think it has something to do with the association with stone.
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What a morning: I have now totally re-worked Obsidian’s Edge 14 & 15. They are certainly different. I’ll be happy to know what you think!
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Dainzú is a strange place with an ethereal spirit that I have scarcely been able to capture. It has stuck in my mind as a place of beatific quietude yet is riddled with secret threats, wild cattle, and underground tunnels. I struggled with this poem and hope that some of that wilderness spirit of survival amidst ruins has come across.
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Again, very vivid … rustic and, at the same time, splendorous. Well done!
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