Where I'm From

It's the grey faced boys
shoved together for a picture
tight shouldered and straight faced
that I can't stop thinking about
wondering how their journey defines me.
The dust shadowing their faces
deforms them and ages them
so they look like men who've
never fully grown and whose faces
are squashed and burrowed.
And what you never see in the pictures
are the women
And now watching Salt of the Earth
women take center stage
women 2,000 miles and a hundred years away.
And maybe child labor is diminished,
but the mining companies still take
all they legally can from them, and then some,
and we're all linked like this,
and we'll never not be linked,
and one day we'll ask why
we never stopped cycling,
why we label it progress
when men take and take and take