PAINTED TURTLE

Perhaps you could have stayed after the night of broken glass
when men shattered your windows, panes like the jaw

of a jaguar, fangs hanging from lintels, sticking up from sills.
Their shoulders bore the ink-stain of barbed wire spider webs.
They gave you one day to sweep away the splinters and decide.

Would you have stayed because the mist-soaked forest
was the only shelter your forefathers have ever known?

Under silent mahogany trees, your brood would flail their limbs
as if they were twigs in the brown river while the basilisks,
their feet webbed just enough, walked on water.

Your bloodline flows north with the humming birds through
coyote country to a place where your family will ride by bus,

pass Return-to-Sender signs to a corrugated steel settlement.
Tracking bracelets, thin and flexible like the ones butterflies wear,
will be fastened to your wrists.

One day in school your progeny will read that Anne and her parents
left their home after Kristallnacht and learn that kindness persists.

So if the north wind withers the honeysuckle,
and your children find a painted turtle, its back broken
along double yellow lines, still glass shards sparkle

in asphalt. You might say to your offspring,
There in the road – do you see them? Count the stars!

Pilgrimage Injustice & Protest Issue 2016
Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest South Jersey Culture & History Center 2021