Their Own Ways Home Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If mothers find themselves carrying the broken
Colors of their children at their elbows,
These mulatto children
Given gringo names
if they linger all out of doors
At different obsessions,
And they stargaze at the different truly colored
Insects,
Or feel the smoke rising from the little grates
Of angels,
They will wait too long- their metamorphosis
Will not evaporate,
And nothing will be done: and their lifetimes
Will belong to the lessons of the parks,
And the busy streets what amusements they find
Standing on the corners watching until the shadows
Regress, and the cars pull around
And the clouds, skipping like wishes of evaporated
Stones, go along their merry way
As their children pool across the sweaty mirages,
And eventually find their own ways home.