Outside Fayetteville

I.

Come north to harvest strawberries and corn,
I wonder what this family of four
disheveled Mexicans must think of us:
they buy a few things at a corner store
outside of which are parked two pick-ups, one
displaying Dixie's "Stars and Bars" inside
the cab's rear window. Never looking up,
the little girl (perhaps in school) has learned
already something that it says about
her place; her father, still an immigrant,
regards it with a curiosity,
a kind of hopeful sympathy, that seems
to ask What country have you fled, and why?

II.

A black man walks along the road beneath
a billboard advertising "Southern Pride!"
He's shirtless in the blazing midday heat,
and pauses in the shade afforded by
the giant cut-out, rippling emblem. Sweat
is dripping off him like a baptism,
the ritual absolving us of what
we never should forget. The sky glares white
above the bold-faced "New Economy,"
the promise of another better day
when all, God willing, shall be judged not by
the color of their skin, but by their "CLOUT."
The black man, slowly moving onward, gleams.

Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He spent three years living in North Carolina during his partner's fellowship training at Duke University. His newest book, Diva, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award. Other poems from his next collection have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Black Book, The New England Review, The New Republic, TriQuarterly, and The Western Humanities Review.

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