NIGHT WOUNDS

Maya Teague

Are you the same moon

That hangs from the firmament

Of well-off places to cast your glow

On backyards of sleeping millionaires

Profligates who want for nothing -- 

But only illumines the squalor

The sordidness of this godless place?

In faraway cities you seem to bestow

Your charm, your gift of romance

These mortals long have forgotten

Their eyes vacant, their souls withered

At night, their voices fill the tenements

A baby wails for food, a wife being scourged

Love perishes under your wakeful eyes.

Fat goons silent, content with the day’s gains

Tawdry faces, bargain-basement nymphets

Out to romp with iniquity again

Shame and virtue tossed into the blackening night

As the hunt for their savior begins

They dream of a McDonald’s breakfast

Textbooks for a sister, pills for their Nanay.

In this sea of hopelessness

My mangled soul must ask:

Are you really the same moon

Western poets rhapsodize about?

You conjure for them great passion

But here, your only purpose to hide

The wounds, the sins, the pain

Of my lost native land…

Maya Teague

maya.teague@yahoo.com