WITH THESE HANDS

Paper thin pieces of walls
(put together) with strength
mustered in moments of madness —

hung with homemade tears.

Eyes, sunken deep in their sockets with sorrow,
faces expressing the violence scars like a holocaust victim
looking with gazes utterly vacant and hollow,
the former castle kings dethroned by a war of weather
stand solemnly next to the maze of hastily erected hovels
surrounded by the litter of wooden ruins
being corpses of dreams slain in the torrid, climatic battle.

Yet they know that tomorrow's victory in the soul is often shallow
for those still alive after the wake of Mother Nature's rage
leaving behind its ravished trail so crushing of the survivor's security.

But the heart will not truly withers, nor dies
when one vows to never quits reaching for hope's skies
and retrace the images from the spoiled fruits of passed labors
reclaiming it with a new season of sweated crowns.

By a light waiting to dawn to orbs ebbing in vision
there is never a lost of resolve's iron
when one's spirit is able to stoke the furnace of reliance
forging anew the concrete and steel incarnations of toil
proudly etched in the soil as something
given life, essence and form
with these hands.