~
I with my camera
take shots of the rocks,
and ponder the labors all lost.

For years upon years,
this place remains here,
when day after day
all trickle away –

The memory, 
a history,
a place called Quarai.

Once diurnal pueblo
of everyday people,
now lie your ruins,
this place once be-troubled –

From Indians,
the Spaniards,
and the Catholic Faith.

The future a guaranteed gamble.

~
Seventeenth Century,
year Seven-Four:
Life in Quarai
exists here no more.

I ponder what labors
and loves are all for:
Apache incursions, 
Spanish diversions,

a reel with the white man’s own faith.

A pueblo people
who’d lived there before,
for hundreds of years
and many years more –

Removed,
resettled, 
to hundreds miles far.

~
Isleta Del Sur,
by the long Rio Grande,
on one side a river
in south Texas land,

a village inhabits many a man.

If asked of forefathers
and where they began,
mano por mano,
each one will point North

to a far away memory,
of long-distant land.

In West-Texan drawls,
each one will then say:  

“Cuaray.”

~
Today, all remains
are rocks and set stone –
The remnants of walls
and a story:

In the Seventeenth Century
a pueblo abandoned –
Nothing of permanence can stay.

Even in a name like Quarai.
~
 

©2013, Marvin Loyd Welborn
3 June 2013/Revised 6 June 2013