PASSAGE TO THE NORTH

I didn’t see the hawks today
hunting finches in the cottonwoods
while floating, flapless, over the ridge.
They have likely departed north.

Nature presses prey and predator,
extra sap oozing in the springtime.
The songbirds start up again,
performances of pure form.

Desert marigolds about to bloom:
give them two weeks to migrate yellow
across the desertscape.

                                      Which way, America?

Liberty is always farther north.
Follow the star out of one danger

zone into another, la fronteriza,
to hear the questions:

                        Who are you
                        What do you want
                        Where are you going
                        Where are you from

Step up to the threshold,
singing birds who think the hawk is gone.

Heading north like birds, you arrive
at the checkpoint with only what
you still carry on your back
and hold in your hands.

Then, the Border Patrol takes that away.
You follow in the footsteps of the Revolution. 
You flee from your life, which made you leave
your home, not even as safe as a nest in the ground.

Robin Scofield is the author of High Pressure (Mouthfeel Press, 2023), Flow (Street of Trees Project, 2019), Sunflower Cantos (Mouthfeel Press, 2012), and a chapbook, And the Ass Saw the Angel (Mouthfeel Press, 2011). Flow was named Southwest Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Theology Today, and The Texas Observer. Recently, her work appeared in The Fourth River, The Banyon Review, and the Border Beats Anthology. She writes with the Tumbleweeds Project in El Paso, where she lives with her husband, her son, two cranky cats, and a small dog names Río.