Michael Hogan
Lament for Honduras
She’s the most distressful nation that ever yet was seen.
—Anonymous Irish song
The pages of the calendar turn
inexorably as autumn leaves, brittle and rustling, speaking of winter
but still holding faint illuminations of the past:
russet, with the dried blood of forgotten wars to the south
brown, like the faces of migrant children,
traces of green, from a time which came once
and could come again:
the double doors leading to the morgue
open also to the garden and the light.
We are busy with our daily routines
self-righteous in our innocence
(we voted after all)
but still afraid to look each other in the eyes,
like strangers trapped in an elevator going down,
while all along the border men gather with guns in our name
uniformed centurions to repel frightened children
fleeing the wasteland we made of Honduras
then called it “peace.”
Michael Hogan is the author In the Time of the Jacarandas (Egret Books, 2015) and 23 other books. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, and others. His work is included in Perrine’s Sound and Sense and the Pushcart Prize Book of Poetry. Hogan lives in Guadalajara Mexico with the fabric artist Lucinda Mayo and their Dutch Shepard Molly Malone.
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