The children are blooming like black flowers,
their teeth are white and lovely, it doesn't matter
what country they live in, the dying
moves over them like wind
through the captured fields.
When I ask how many know someone with AIDS
they all shout, their arms rising like snakes,
waving hungry palms,
Can a dog get it, can you get it from a hickey,
why can't they just pump out all a person's blood
and put in new?
Afterward the teacher says to me, That one there,
buck teeth, she has sex with three or four boys a week,
they come over from the high school,
do it to her in the yard,
her sister had a baby at thirteen -
and overhead, the dark
bodies of the hawks
riding their hunger through the clear sky,
the sun laying its fair, long tongue
over everything.

Day Two - A Speaker With AIDS

One-third of the class speaks no English
and Mark of the beautiful Indian cheekbones,
the barrio, the broken, winged life
stumbles in his grandparents' Spanish
so the solemn little freckled kid translates
as Mark says, Tell them it's going to kill me,
saying, Dice que le va a matar,
his dark-lashed sunflower face composed,

and the sun says, Forget about the forty days
and nights of rain, I'm here, I'm burning.

Day Three - You Must Protect Yourself

It's like shouting from the shore
of a glittering lake,
Look, we've been given these bodies
we don't understand, 
we could spend our whole lives
learning how to live in them.

It doesn't matter what I say.

Sex, if it hasn't already, will rise up in them
like something from another world,
like the snowy egret on its perfect stilts
in the dank puddle by the highway,
shocking in its grace,
fishing for its life