The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Suspension Bridge over Rio Grande, El Paso, Texas" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1908 - 1909.
The photo speaks a thousand words, one
for each mile they travelled
Baby on her father’s back
tucked inside his T-shirt,
face down in the waters of the Rio Grande,
hair trimmed in reeds instead of ribbons
Abrogation of the Dream
that persuaded her family to flee
a thousand miles’ journey to the border
and the torch-bearing promise of freedom
to be denied.
The photo of the baby and her father
who set his daughter on the banks of a new world
and swam back for her mother,
never intending to end up in the river
or hear his wife scream as their future
jumped back into swift currents
and was swept away.
If you are brown and poor and desperate,
do not come to America
Color is skin-deep
like sky and earth, fire and blood
All shades mingle transparent in water
that gives life or takes life
in the chance current,
water that births us in chance skin
Valeria’s arm, still slung around her father
Oscar’s neck, in death’s tableau
Remember them, and let your heart
break, just a little
Gayle J. Greenlea is an American-Australian poet and counselor for survivors of sexual and gender-related violence. Her poem, “Wonderland,” received the Australian Poetry Prod Award in 2011. She shortlisted and longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize in 2013, and debuted her first novel, Zero Gravity, at the KGB Literary Bar in Manhattan in 2016.
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