This Is My Last Report

By Juan Felipe Herrera
 

This is my last report:

I wanted to speak of existence, the ants most of all,

dressed up in their naughty flame-trousers, the exact jaws,

their unknowable kindnesses, their abyss of hungers,

and science, their mercilessness, their prophetic military

devotions, their geometry of scent, their cocoons

for the Nomenclature,

I wanted to speak of the Glue Sniffers

and Glue Smoothers who despise all forms

unbound, loose in their amber nectars, I wanted

to point to their noses, hoses and cables and networks,

their tools, if I can use that word now—and scales and

scanners and Glue Rectories.

I wanted you to meet my broom mother

who carved a hole into her womb

so that I could live—

At every sunset she stands

under the shadow of the watchtowers

elongating and denying her breath.

I wanted to look under the rubble fields

for once, for you (if you approved), flee

into the bullet-riddled openness and fall flat,

arched, askew, under the rubble sheets

and let the rubble fill me

with its sharp plates and ripped dust—

alphabets incomplete and humid. You,

listen,

a little closer

to the chalk dust—this child swinging her left arm,

a ribbon, agitated by unnamed forces, devoured.

Juan Felipe Herrera, "This Is My Last Report" from Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2008 by Juan Felipe Herrera.  Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.


Source: Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008)