dark country

on the dingy streets
where grey air hangs like smoke
above the cinder block houses, all tilted with crooked lines
toward the dullest half moon...
...there we walk
because poverty knows us
and takes us in, like a mother too old to nurse
and too weary to bathe wounds--with no verses to sing softly

and the others breathe vapors of pain
the night hides their faces
but you can hear their hoarse laughter echo down the alleys
while they immerse a misery, so refined and pure, beneath the dizziness of no-hope

when we pray, we see them peek out

with serious, blinking eyes
and then we become one with it all
the others,
the poverty, the misery, the greyness and the prayers
a murky, dark pond with slender swirls of light