One Poem: <i>The Hunger</i>

The Hunger

Have they felt the hunger too?
it's an old emptiness under the rug,
the rumbling of dust facing off to brawl for the blackened land.
Have they seen the faces with their hanging skin,
the yellowed teeth, the sun-bleached earth?

There is a wind that never ceases,
so long as the stars shine cruelly in the reflection of milky eyes.
They have passed through time as tumbleweed ghosts,
a desert graveyard, an empty sky,
an air wistful with the coyote's squall,
and they have felt the hunger in their bones -
The rock fortitude of leather beaten skin, hanging jaw, matted hair -
a hunger that lifts with the dust,
a pair of mud cracked lips to kiss the last drip of a lost rain.
They have felt the wind carry ancient tears away.
Barren as the night, they cry.