Concertina Conundrum

Chip Dameron

February 18, 2024

early January 2024

Three days ago, a young musician

performed in an auditorium in Arizona,

playing the Irish jigs and traditional

folk songs that comprise her repertoire. 

Today she drives up to Shelby Park 

in Eagle Pass, steps out of her rental car,

and stands next to the park entrance,

now fenced off and locked, and plays

her concertina, squeezing a slow dirge

that floats and spins through the air,

honoring the 700 wooden crosses

(adults’ white, children’s pink or blue)

in rows across the field, memorializing

those who died along the Rio Grande

this past year. Two National Guardsmen

sitting in a Humvee inside the fence 

step out and motion for her to move on,

but she continues playing, the bellows

unfolding and folding, sending music

past the soldiers and toward the river,

toward those determined to come across.

A young woman stands on the bank

and shivers in the afternoon sunlight

as she stares at the string of buoys

in mid-river and then at the glinting

razor tips on the concertina wire

curling along the opposite bank.

After her husband was murdered

by a rebel faction in El Salvador,

she pleaded with her older brother

to take her and her two children

somewhere safe, and he, fearing 

for his life too, helped her gather up 

bare essentials and head northward. 

Weeks of travel have brought them

to this crossing point. She tightens

the shawl holding her baby against

her chest, looks at her toddler locked

against her brother’s back, and nods

twice to her brother. As they begin

wading, she hears the faint sadness

of a song from across, and continues.

Chip Dameron’s most recent book is Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, which combines a collection of his poems with a collection by poet Betsy Joseph. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and a former Dobie Paisano Fellow.