THE FINAL HARVEST

They say that when God finished creating the world,

He hid all his left-overs in Chile behind the mountains.

Perhaps that is why my father ended up there-

A left-over from antiquity-

The archetypal Patriarch,

Or perhaps when all his global ambitions were taken up by no one,

He found refuge in a hidden land, tucked between the Andes and the sea,

The last splinter of civilization before the Arctic waste.

So that, if all else failed,

The sad creature international life created,

Could simply slip off into icy oblivion.