What was it worth to you?

— that accent that drowned 

as you crossed the pacific

Its weight in salt water?

It’s weight in sand too white,

Crowned in garnet?

Its weight in severed lineage?

The women from the villages

Crowned in black veils

Beat their chests and wail

Weili

Ya waylati

Digging grief portals for the rest of us

While fathers dug graves for children.

The cost of a mistranslation?

How do you say thekla in English?

How do you translate its perversion?

The Babelian horror unleashed by money 

taken from the mouths of the poor and thrown 

into balls of fire that kill futures. 

Thrown into graves for children. 

Money that burns over there and money that drowns over here. 

Still, the waves themselves sound like the waves back home. 

Like cruel thieves with no god but the moon. 

If you squint your ears just enough, you can hear them 

— the fishermen by the decimated port 

singing about the sand back home — the smell of it. 

Singing about return, even in their own port.