Across the scrub and cedar brake, A heavy, copper current wakes: Four hundred miles of humming wire Drawn taut beneath a summer fire, To feed the racks where servers gleam And trade the river’s breath for steam, While thirsting plains beneath the sky Watch data drink the channels dry. Inside the wards where fluorescent beams Cut through the quiet, measured dreams, The ledger drops, a silent blow— Cold millions halted in their flow, As healers count the shrinking days Caught in the federal ledger’s maze, Wondering whose bed, whose final breath, Must bear the balance sheet of death. Northward, upon the prairie flat, They trim the doorways where we sat; Ninety-two precincts bar the door, The ballots fewer than before, While down in Dallas, steel runs high Beneath an armored autumn sky— A party gathers behind the gate, To weigh the fortunes of the state. Above the street, on roadside posts, The sleepless lenses keep their posts: Three hundred Flock cams blink and stare, Recording who was passing there, Unblinking in the dusk and dawn, To log each shadow, come and gone. September brought the ledger’s law— A seal on solar, panel and saw, A right to mend the broken chip, And gold stamped into ownership, While courts dispute the badge and chain, The borders drawn in salt and pain, Where false words bind an agent fast To answers demanded at the last. And down along the border seam, The Rio Grande forgets to stream, Its muddy ribs laid bare and dry Beneath the wide, unyielding sky— Yet out where salt and ocean roll, The tides yield up a stranger soul: Ten million butterflies of sea, Soft, winged shells in drift and plea, Washed ashore on the lonely sand, A whispered prayer to a restless land.
