Last night as I laid on my bed, heartbroken for the people I encounter here in Mendoza without hope, I was reminded of my plane ride back to the states from Argentina 2 years ago. I couldn’t sleep then either. I was wrestling with all I had seen, all the faces of precious kids who would grow into the vacant-eyed youth that we had worked with. I wrote this then and it rings true to how I feel as I am back….
{doce de mayo}
their faces crowd my eyelids
their eyes plead “how can you leave”
“how can you leave us here?”
and really, how can i?
sleep evades me like it does him,
on the nights when his mom doesn’t come home
the nights the voices carry,
the gunshots linger
i grasp for the meaning of it
why and how He is all and means all and gives all meaning.
i grasp the way her fingers do
when jumping and grabbing at all she can see,
all she believes she can reach
nothing more and nothing less.
and really, we grasp at the same thing, them and i
for love, for worthiness,
for meaning to the worn shoes and black eye and tragedy
and the beautiful, mysterious redemption.
