A Postcard from the Volcano

The woman walked past the many tourist shops littering the boardwalk, their brightly colored windows designed to draw the gaudily dressed visitors, like moths to a flame, and snickered slightly to herself about the lack of creativity associated with each of these little tiendas. Stopping briefly, she looked at the postcards lining the revolving metal cage. One particular photograph caught her eye. It was a picture of happy Caucasian children playing at the base of the ancient ruins at the edge of town.

A part of her died a little bit at the way her country had sold itself for the sake of economy, completely disregarding the history and the trials of the ancients who had worked the ground before them. She wondered if those same happy Caucasian children would understand how her anscestors had worked through the season's starting with the autumn, how even now you could sometimes smell the pungent coiling aroma of fresh grapes. Or if they understood how to tell if the winter was just around the corner by the smell of the frost in the air that would bite at the harvest trying to stunt and freeze their growth. She wondered if those children could have felt the paralyzing breath of the first frost of the autumn and know that summer had finally ended.

She knew that very few natives of this country visited the ruins anymore. No one seemed to care about the ancestors or wanted to pay homage to their bones. Could the natives understand, or even guess all that those bones had meant? That the ruins, and the remnants of once vital bodies and countries were important? She supposed that maybe a few did, maybe a few understood all that the land meant to them, but not enough to make a real difference.

The once fertile ground was now commercialized, and the mansions that littered across the town were mere tourist traps, placed here to show the discrepancy between the rich and the poor. The poor, the ones who maybe understood the land around them were completely blocked from the land that had once helped them to prosper, now the land belonged to the foreigners. The schools teach things that the kids do not understand, the native tongue is taught in an objective manner, not meant to inspire but rather to fill time. The children speak words now of t heir fore-fathers not knowing what the words mean, and why they are important.

She wondered if the people living in  those mansions understood what they had done to the country. If they knew that they were part of the reason why there were so many poor here in this country. If they knew that because of their greed many of the houses that the local urchins lived in were nothing more than the gutted ruins of what had once been a home.

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of t hings, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is...Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived t here left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.