Oh let the river run
Cutting canyons through metamorphic monoliths
promising a life anew
sweeping away a lifetime of dreams
Let it flow
where hope and human migration
are dashed against the rocks
Labor’s sweat swirling in the river’s current
splits the family
towing the children under
Let the river flow
where you meet the drowned dreamers
desperate gems yet unpolished
strewn like trash
with contempt
Pearls too dark to belong in a trending epoch of whiteness
Across the Rio Grande
the north scattered with bones of buffalo and millennia of ancestors
bleached with sweat
covered with the dust of rubber tires and the interstate
buried under cloned strip malls
and bodegas where the flow of remittances hesitate in a pool of failed aspiration
Let the river run
where dreams of the Jordan and dignity slowly settles into the toxic sediment of humiliation
Smothering the strength to start over again
Let it flow
during a ten minute break
The blood
The tears
The fears
The asphalt
scrapes the flesh of his face
Several bodies sink him
Netting him into a school of writhing humanity.
Let the river run where liquid lives, dreams tumble
and the eternal flow of life persists
slowly carving through ice and rock
Falling home
toward the sea
Let the river run
Washing away the soul of “America”
cleansing precious stones that have been tossed away by ignorance