A year later
Lives later
Daughters and sons
Sisters and brothers
Mothers and fathers
Cousins, aunts, uncles
Gone away now
Not dust in the wind but
Mesquite leaves beaten down by
Hailstones falling all too quickly
All too often

Those who might build shelters from the storm
Take up their hammers and their Phillips-heads indeed
But what do they seek to pound on and screw
While some new La Llorona festers gestating
Ready to be born into a world made wet with obscene dripping

She will scream as she is born
And her own mother will scream
Again and again
And it may be that we have already heard the pangs of her birth
Ringing in a tritone over
Smaller cries silenced too swiftly