El Salvador & faith

In El Salvador, we each had to do a final project after our Liberation Theology class. El Salvador was perhaps the most intense experience I had in any of the countries I've spent time in these past months. I decided to write a poem about it.

Here's where the poem stands now in the revisionary process--

Faith

I.

Like some humans and chickens,
some stories are ground-dwellers,
peck peck pecking at tossed handfuls
of dried words, resigning faith
to the pale hand dipping in
the frame, the sky a blue door
locked. Down-eyed with craned necks,

they are not life stories, with steady gaze
up, out, to the sky our window,
with yawning senses steeping in
the hot snap of winged metaphor,
with face to the sun and the moon man,
coaxing us into the front yard
of the universe; a life story is

a view. Like sky birds, these histories
glide and jag and twist all of it
together, we watch them rewrite
the air and rename gravity,
flying through altitudes for death
and the hatch, clouds and mountains,
and not for timeliness, or efficiency.

II.

Why else but for a new life
story do we hike thick brush and thin
oxygen to capped peaks of countries,
decades, but for hope to fix
saucer eyes to the heavy flap
of screech and song circling overhead?
Why else but to lose our breath and be held

in the grip of plated talons, of wings
muscled like highways, for hope to fly
over crashing crests of royal blues,
to scope the little pixels of the heads
moving over the sand, to feel
the beat of the breeze through an open door;
A life story has no conclusion

but action. There is no freedom
but to open your bones to the flocks,
letting their glide pick up your elbows
like a marionette, plunk you
in oceans, shoving the wet round world

around your feet and up your nose,
to fill your lungs of salt and faith.