History Kids
       

These kids, these kids in tents, white tents
in camps in Texas. These brown kids who trekked
miles with parents, deserts and mountain passes
with parents, days of scorch and nights with parents
with flashlights, stars with mama's voice soothing
kids with moon-blued skin, with closed eyelids
and dreaming, with high-noon shadows and humming,
the land sliding into hand-me-down shoes,
laceless, rubber soles worn thin. These kids
now in chain-link pens, trapped in, wrapped in
thermal blankets, in synthetic shine, flashing together
like stars, the ones you don't see, hidden
by distance, by degrees below horizon, by these
government tents, these canopies of white. In pictures
they blur their faces, they vanish anguished eyes
we see anyway, anyway we imagine, which shade
of earth, which hue of helpless, specks of gold
or green like mica in stone. Oh America, your own
kids shimmer this summer, this season of turning
hydrants to fountains, mailboxes to scrap metal
thanks to fireworks, waxy vines on kitchen walls
thanks to crayons, thanks to kids, but that's
how they are, that's what they do. They're just
kids. They're just kids.

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Copyright © 2022 David Hernandez All rights reserved
from Hello I Must Be Going
University of Pittsburgh Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission