At Twilight on the Road to Sogamoso

The sun is beginning to go down

over a field of yellow onions. The edges

of the clouds are almost pink, and at this hour

the maguey rises up like a flower of dark blades.

I worked so long today I have forgotten

my own hunger. It takes a full minute

for me to remember a word I have used

all my life. What the Mexicans call poncho.

At twilight I see it, abandoned, hanging like a ghost

on the limb of a tree: my own brown ruana

next to gray speckled chickens pecking at roots

and a black track of storm coming west over the green mountain.

 

--Maurice Kilwein Guevara