Otero Junior College Chinook

Machu Picchu II

As I walk up the stone stairway at Machu Picchu
I ask the people who lived here five centuries ago
Did you have enough to eat?
Did you work all day on the terraces,
Growing maize and potatoes?
Did you herd the alpacas
And collect their wool?
Did you raise your voices to the gods?
Did you sing lullabies and laments?
Did you fall in love between these gray stones?
Did children play in the grassy square?
Did you delight in the butterflies?
Did you look up into the night sky
And marvel at the Milky Way?

While you were building these granite walls,
On the other side of the world
Shakespeare wrote and acted.
Did you have poets?
DaVinci invented and painted.
Did you have a Leonardo?
Columbus sailed in your day.
Did you have explorers?
Gutenberg made a printing press,
But you had no writing.

If you had written, we would know you for more than these Inca walls.
Five centuries ago more than a thousand slept under these thatched roofs.
Ninety years later the town was empty.
Jungles crept over the terraces.
If you’d written, we would know you.

—Judy Hensley
Emeritus Faculty