My father’s childhood home
was condemned a few years before.
Looking at the simple house, above us
on the slight hill, I wanted to enter, except
my tía stopped me, pointing to
the home now alive with wasps
and bees weaving, in and out,
returning it to the humid mountains.
My father told me
he used to send $35 a month to help
pay for the mortgage when he was in the Army.
What I want to do, from across the sea,
is to let the insects have this home,
safe from extinction,
and to welcome the lizards
that scamper along the walls, so my dad has
a place to return to in Lajas, inside
the house of bees, with hives humming
and built up in every corner, where ant colonies
climb from the ground,
in the shape of the ancestors
my father swore the family saw
greeting them in his childhood nights.