Excerpt from “The Folding Cliffs”
grudging return to the alien claimants some of whom
moved in among the ruins and tried to resume
a semblance of the old life and it came to be part of them
of leasing while the hungry who could do a day’s work
were taught to labor and be paid in credit and the streams
were turned out of their former veins into alien
enterprises that were plantations of coffee
wide marshes of rice and the irresistible poison
and imperial promises of sugar and volcanic
sounds and smells of its mills and lands around them flowed into them
all that has lived in those places flowed into them and the taste
was sweet nothing