Somewhere In The Desert Poem by Shannon Harney

My sweet crumbling child;
I found your name in the lights that line the streets of this burning city,
even as the smoke of a newborn cycle
had lifted your morass eyes to mine.
I watch you indulge a penance,
even though your sentence does not provide for such.
You are different.
There is something tranquil in the way you shuffle through my thoughts;
a peaceful variation to the usual hustling aboard the trains.
I would like to have met you in simpler times,
when words were of elementary value.
Perhaps at a time when encoded variation
was no need for disdain- if such a time exists.
Who do you belong to, child?
Have your parents led you to believe
that you belong among this wreckage?