{"id":3369,"date":"2025-06-02T15:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.maryknollsociety.org\/magazine\/?p=3369"},"modified":"2025-12-31T02:15:33","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T02:15:33","slug":"poem-a-migrants-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.maryknollsociety.org\/magazine\/poem-a-migrants-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"Poem: A Migrant\u2019s Trail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">In this moving poem, <a href=\"https:\/\/mklm.org\/our-people\/missioners\/profile-rick-dixon\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maryknoll Lay Missioner Rick Dixon<\/a> follows one <a href=\"https:\/\/www.maryknollmagazine.org\/2023\/12\/borders-of-hope\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">migrant\u2019s trail<\/a> to its tragic end, a grave marker in a potter\u2019s field.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p><br>She\u2019s knocking on the door of light one more time,<br>and one more time it opens only to darkness.<br>There are shadows lying across the land,<br>but she knows the desert has two faces,<br>the terror of death and the treasures of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A migrant\u2019s trail, where a smile is a jewel,<br>a meal a miracle, a safe place to sleep, heaven on earth.<br>Yes, the desert has two faces, she\u2019s seen them both.<br>The terror of death and the treasures of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She knows all too well the trail of cruelty,<br>and the trail of love,<br>and where moments of kindness can turn into a last instant.<br>I wonder if she drowned in the irrigation canal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Only \u201cJane Doe\u201d and a row number mark the red brick of her pauper\u2019s grave.<br>A privacy fence stretching hundreds of yards posts NO TRESPASSING,<br>where for uncounted migrants, death hits a wall.<br>Yet it is strewn with flowers, some fresh and alive,<br>others wilted and dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It does something to you, weeping at the edge of this field.<br>In sackcloth, you cross over a deep sadness, a loneliness, to a gentle presence:<br>God the Great Solitaire.<br>And from our first moment to our last instant,<br>the desert closes us down and breaks us open<br>to the terror of death and the treasures of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/www.maryknollmagazine.org\/author\/richard-dixon\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rick Dixon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br><em>Featured image: Dusk falls on Arizona\u2019s Sonoran Desert, where a 14-member volunteer team made up mostly of Jesuit seminarians and priests carried out a search and rescue mission Dec. 20-22, 2024, to look for missing or dead migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. OSV News\/Courtesy of Luke Taylor)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this moving poem, Maryknoll Lay Missioner Rick Dixon follows one migrant\u2019s trail to its tragic end, a grave marker in a potter\u2019s field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":3370,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","_eb_data_table":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,25,40],"tags":[842,845,839,841,843,844,846],"class_list":["post-3369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-departments","category-featured-stories","category-summer-2025","tag-border","tag-maryknoll-lay-missioner-rick-dixon","tag-maryknoll-magazine-summer-2025","tag-migrants-trail","tag-paupers-grave","tag-poem","tag-potters-field"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Poem: A Migrant\u2019s Trail - 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