09/15/2014
Last night
Upon leaving my studio by the river,
I heard La Llorona coughing in the tall weeds.
La Llorona, the Crying Woman,
Hesitates mid-sob to let out a whimpering cough,
Trying to release ashen stories from her lungs.
She is the forest of weeds
The first touch of fall in the late-summer-night’s winds
Coyotes howling at the Harvest Moon
The coughing strangers in the shadows
The bumps in the night
The cobwebs decorating your home
The screeching thunderheads
The dusty cut and bleeding rocks
Never-heard-by-humans screams from dying trees
The sap sticky on our hands.
Ghosts, evil spirits, disturbed beings–
These are man-made realities.
Not divine, mythical creatures
But simply another monstrous manifestation of humanity’s darkest actions.
She is the things that go bump in the night–
Bombs dropping
The beaten and kicked and raped
The addicts of our streets
The adulterous lust of malcontent
The silence of police sirens and gun shots
The institution of forgetting and not listening
The cobwebs in your mind
The shrieks of pain and loss and passion, lost in the night, forgotten by daylight.
All just coughs in the dark,
Tangled in tall weeds.
La Llorona, oil on canvas, Meg G. Freyermuth 2014
Artist On The Road 