Devastating earthquake on Ecuador’s Coast, April 16, 2016.

 

 

Elegy for Ecuador

 

After the quaking and breaking—

and that eternal silence, begging for

sounds of life, everything continues to sway.

Everything still trembles: hills, trees, children, animals,

even the sky.

 

Life teeters perilously inside the invisible parts, where

the devastation is just getting started.

A skinny dog spreads her black body over the rubble

that was her home, clinging stubbornly

to the spot:  a life raft on a treacherous sea.

She waits for humans who will never return.

A ceibo tree weeps in the distance.

 

The equatorial sun dips into the sea too soon,

too fast,

abandoning the beleaguered mass of humanity,

while the swash

claims intimate pieces of

once well-ordered lives—

now flotsam and jetsam, swept away.

The tide groans on into the night.

 

At first light, snowy egrets spread their angelic white wings

over rivers of sorrow, like angels from some other world.

In the still-quivering shrimp ponds below the hills,

the cows catch a reflection of something large,

a heap of darkness, a sound, a whirl.

 

A helicopter flies overhead, and then another,

filled with hope.

And between the ruptured

blue hills veiled in grief,

caravans of healing and solidarity overcome buckled roads

and falling rocks,

pushing toward the coast and its sorrowful tale.

 

Ecuador’s collective pain rouses the old ways of indigenous

resilience, a tacit sense of connection in which all are

brothers, sisters, cousins: family.

Even the earth and the trees:  family. 

Family, faith, and that ancient embrace of sumak kawsay—

life at its fullest—

all rises to meet the devastation and death with

resilience and love.

 

This is Ecuador, the land of beauty and family

and irrepressible hope.

 

Ecuador lies in ruins, but

Ecuador can never, never be broken.

 

Patricia Adams Farmer lived on the coast of Ecuador (Bahia, El Matal-Jama, and Manta)  from 2011-2015.