Sophie Duncan, Arizona Rancher

  by Leslie Clark

 
Like these Mexican immigrants, I too was once 
a stranger to this land.
A bride from Germany, that land of forests
and plentiful rain, a place where seasons
turned gracefully on time’s orbit,				
a land of a million tones of green.
Did I know when I fell in love
with my handsome American soldier
that I’d say goodbye to green forever?

Still, this land I married with my Doug
has a beauty all its own
in its subtleties of color, its tiny shifts of season.
The mountains here are dry—stark guardians
of the beiges of our ranch land.
I’ve found a taste for hot and parched,
for the haunting yelps of coyotes in the night,
for the stolidity of cattle and these western men.

These tattered people who plod through our property,
are they so different from me?
I, too, traveled far for this new life,
though to be sure, all my journeys
were within the law.  But when laws
make no sense, what are people
supposed to do?  “They need to stay
where they belong,” my husband growls.
Strange word—belong. Do I, from an ocean’s
width away belong more than those
who come from just across some 
invisible line of countries? 

I cried and cursed them when I found 
my lovingly tended garden,
my tiny touch of cherished green
trampled and raided by invaders
from the night. And it was I who held
my granddaughter when she sobbed over
the slaughter of her favorite calf,
by illegal travelers desperate for a meal.

But worse still are the eyes 
of the captured, chocolate syrup brown,
showing their loss, their terror,
as my husband and sons detain them
for the Border Patrol.  I go about and give them
water.  They murmur, “Gracias,” drink
and bow their heads. A terrible thing,
for any human, this vanquishing of hope.
How can anyone have the right
to be a part of such a thing?