My Invented Land

(after Mario Meléndez) My native soil was created from tiny sparks that clung to grandmother’s earthen pot which conjured savoury dishes I’ve been looking for all my life in vain. My homeland has no boundaries. At cockcrow one day it found itself inside a country to its west, (on rainy days it dreams looking east when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.) My people have disinterred their alphabet, burnt down decrepit libraries in a last puff of nationalism even as a hairstyle of native women have been allowed to become extinct. My native place has not been christened yet my homeland, a travelogue without end, a plate that will always be greedy (but got rice mixed with stones) My home has young people who found their dreams in a white substance and the old that transplanted their eyes, it has leaders who have disappeared into their caricatures. My home is a gun pressed against both temples a knock on a night that has not ended a torch lit long after the theft a sonnet about body counts undoubtedly raped definitely abandoned in a tryst with destiny.