One Sunday Morning
Jan Seale
August 20, 2022
I.
When my son and I head west upriver early on a Sunday in spring we come upon a story: fifty humans walking the east-bound lane in silence, families in front—mothers holding swaddled babies, fathers with toddlers beside—youths to the rear with backpacks, their shoes aflop with no laces. Slow trucks of the border patrol, one leading, another following, shepherd the line. These humans have crossed nation to nation in the night and come up from the Rio at daybreak, cheered on by mesquite, huisache, ebony.
II.
An hour passes and we arrive at our own destination on the Rio Grande. We finish our official business but hesitant to leave, walk a block in this post-colonial town, eye a caliche path that spans the embankment. Holding on to each other, we inch our way down, feeling ourselves being studied on a distant screen. Still, no uniforms or flashing lights, no gates, walls, or demands of credentials. We find ourselves under the bridge, an oasis between nations, a few permitted cars clunking overhead—perhaps to deliver bread, the Mass, or visiting abuelas. Across, in the determined Mexican town, church bells start up, activate baying dogs. The morning breeze from the Gulf reaches miles upriver to skim cool over the water. Two Mexican children swish-dance around the bridge pillars. Dare we a moment of grace? There’s more.
III.
We turn our gaze upward, where a thousand mud bowls surprise us, a tightly woven mural on the bridge underbelly. Swallows have sought out this manmade contraption, glued their ceramic nests, obscuring the girders, the concrete, the stays. Now birds dart, soar, descend, happy with the morning’s feed, returning to their chicks through the mouths of their grinning mud gourds, each choosing its own.
IV.
This, this, we say, is what it means to take hold of peace: sunrise yellowing the day, water speaking prudence, air breathing kindness, the duet of swallow wings and children’s laughter, all here between nations. We think of the humans back on the road who have crossed this morning filled with fear and hope, and of those who receive them in dutiful patience day in, day out. How the birds give, in their innocent tight formation of nests, the definition of neighbors. How the earth tells us that the way things fit is what we must know. How this moment comes saying connection, connection.
Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, lives in Texas on the U.S.-Mexican border. She has held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and has served as a Humanities Scholar for Humanities Texas. Her latest book of poetry is PARTICULARS: poems of smallness, published by Lamar University Literary Press.
