The War-Widows Are Heard, Nepal 2006

The country where your husband is accused by a debt-ridden neighbor,
seized in the sun-dried cornfield, is the country no one can escape,
the country we all live in, encased in smooth walls, clean laundry,
paper cut-out newsmen and bold-faced fashion fronts.

Your homespun shawl and burning eyes hold the still point
for a room of squirming children, a youth old before his time,
a woman who will never weep again. You travel far to tell
your story in a place where nobody knows who you are.

You stand watch behind the woven walls of a house
while men throw other men into a river like sacks of evidence,
while men who have nothing to lose push faces underwater
until they thin out, pale as words coming through two languages

transparent as tadpoles, though words swim better than men,
better than we do through two languages, better than your husband,
who wishes to be a fish, who wishes to slip away
but gets caught, buckles, floats to a place of blind eyes.

The men in khaki shorts haul their catch onto tractors,
water dripping off the bruised and splayed limbs.
The relevant authorities cannot offer words at all
in any language, but you speak, you go on speaking.