Abuelo

oh brother, brother, brother of my soul, 

where you are and stay you call home. 

beyond valleys of toucans and parakeets, 

you worked coffee plains and fields of maize with your own two feet. 

you watched how cashew trees grew the fruit of your family’s labor. 

you watched tanks crush the soil of your cattle and chickens, 

you watched your children grow under the sun, 

and under that same sun, you watched them go. 

off they went to build their new family a mile down from yours, 

off they went to live in town, 

off they went to bare a new life in new lands your eyes were foreign to.  

yet you endured the loss of your two youngest, next to your wife,

and oh, you accepted life’s bullets and injustices. 

but as the years blew by, 

times changed and work grew less, your body bent like the branches of willow trees, 

and your smile reflected the crest of the moon. 

your grandchildren are dispersed like the millet given to hen in the morns,

and as a granddaughter who saw you a few times

--probably visited you only 3 times when I was nine and ten. 

twelve years later, 

you were buried under an olive tree, 

there I saw my father weep. 

I felt helpless,

couldn’t help my old man breathe because it was you he wanted alive to see.