Poem Inspired by a Photograph of a Nanny Goat Staring Out to Sea

By John B. Lee

There she stands gazing out to sea this broken-belt she goat this cabra standing alone on the stony shore of this Caribbean coast staring longingly over the wide blue waters dreaming of service to her long-forgotten past this give of milk and meat brought to the island by circumstance of her ruminant mother her bearded father stylishly trimmed in his Van Dyke pose his Billy goat stance his political mind does she remember the long flight from the holy land is it still in her blood to know the rocky remainder of the Sanai and the exodus of ancestors her cousins in Mexico the Huay Chivo of the Yucatán those half-human sorcerers oh she is there in the rubble in the rock and greenery of her new home waiting for the ships she is dreaming longing for the far country of a kind milker’s gentle hands

By Jorge Alberto Pérez