A porcelain cup in old Beijing, Where steady hands and treaties cling; Across twelve thousand leagues of foam, A diplomat seeks ground from home, While back beneath the church-bell chime, A patron feast is caught in time— A sudden flare, an acrid breath, Where celebration turns to death, Ten spirits lost to flash and stone, And sixty-four left marked in bone. Beside the Gulf, the towers hum, Where heavy, modern riches come: Dos Bocas cracks the midnight tide, Two hundred thousand barrels wide, A record torn from salt and steel To prove the engine’s power real. Yet northern podiums declaim A lesser land, a lesser name— Reduced to harvest in a crate, A tamale on a paper plate, While southward under muffled skies, Two thousand exiled faces rise, Turned back across an alien floor To knock upon another door. The cattle wait behind the pen, Inspected, cleared, and moved again; A fallen leader steps aside, With phantom arms he cannot hide; And somewhere in a filmmaker’s head, New gothic dragons wake the dead, While satire mocks the robot hand Rebuilding all the borderland. More than the freight, more than the dust, More than the neighbor’s broken trust: A country stitched from oil and flame, Far greater than a passing name, Surviving storm and insult still, Through stubborn grace and iron will.
