The Disappeared
The Disappeared
By Kathleen Weaver
juntos iremos unidos en la sangre,
ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte
--Víctor Jara
The mothers walk in an imperfect circle.
The photographs they hold
become a portion of lost sleep.
A vanishing point in the landscape: the mothers
lose track of it; it was
there, it was, along the desert coast.
In a European painting
a mother ascends through vaulting clouds,
heavens open, the mood victorious.
Or: an aura of transcendent suffering
surrounds Mary, the same age as her son
in Michelangelo’s Pietà.
A wind exhorts
the hours to fill with rain, rain and return.
Until there is only myrrh
to anoint the bodies.
Bodies flung from military planes into the sea.
Or buried in abject secret.
In the Atacama’s extreme aridity,
survivors sift dirt,
fingering rocks that might disclose a mass grave.
To identify a bone or bone fragment,
that would be an end.
The mothers are on their own.
Back then to the cradle
and the swaddling.
Hold the flailing arms close to the body.
Kathleen Weaver is a poet and translator, especially of Cuban poets. She is also the author of a biography with poetry translations: Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal, With a Selection of Her Poems (Penn State University Press). Her first book of poems Too Much Happens, is published by The Post-Apollo Press. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Chariton Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Flash, among others. She lives in Berkeley, California.