What History Repeats

The river is still, deep black water,

Running through caverns of  Mayan hell,

Stories made here too horrible and ancient to tell.

Surrounded by a forest tunnel

She dreams of going beyond her mountain world,

She dreams of things to come that are beautiful, beyond the human race

Beyond the sun’s godlike face

Beyond the moon whose shadows show

the magic of the mountains and jungles below.

the jaguar god once gave his laws

with lethal silver claws,

unsheathed blades for teeth

metallic shell with skin beneath

People from somewhere, a foreign word she learned to hate

she knows it’s her condemned people’s fate

to realize nothing.

In her city

The men have fought each other and died

The lowlands in over harvested forest have dried,

The children once hungry now disappeared,

The voices of old women silenced by what they feared

Until only she is left, fertile and full of broken anticipation,

Her lover, her brothers and sisters, her father and mother, all Mayan.

Gone, one by one, until bereft like a shell, she stands silhouetted one last time

In what should have been her most splendid prime.

Raising her arms to Hunab Ku, the god of gods,

Raising her arms to greet the sun,  

From the tallest building on the tallest mountain,

Bursting forth, like a black jaguar wishing for wings,

She sings to Quatzelcoatl, god of wind, as she falls,

disappearing into the jungle far below,

joining legends of shadowy beings and naked bone

from a civilization once great, now gone.