Inferno - Poem

African American Review, Fall, 2002

Inferno.

Myronn Hardy


Lazarus
  in Salvador your children sleep
on the steps of churches. They wait
for their sores to crawl off  leeches  ticks
too full for more.

No one gives them bread. The priests
and nuns pass every morning before
mass  black robes over false idols.

Tonight the police will gather their
lives  guns will spit  their steel
bodies blood hot.

They will visit you in Israel  they
will swim in the River Jordan. What was
that life? All of those palm trees  coconuts
  sky of violets I could hardly see  my hand
stretched out for another.

Myronn Hardy is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. His first collection of poems, Approaching the Center, was published by New Issues Press in 2001.