The Dogs of Temozón
A structure will tell you a story,
rising mighty and tall—
be it a Mayan pyramid
or the Chinese Great Wall.
Yet some stories are living,
in bodies worn and frail,
carried through centuries,
through long-forgotten tale.
By a dusty road that winds
toward a water pit,
a stray dog sways and stumbles
in scorching, shadeless heat.
She’s old, her body broken,
her frame worn thin with pain.
She drops upon her belly,
then struggles up again.
She repeats what her kin once did
each dawn with the rising sun,
since the Spanish hounds stormed
the sands of Yucatán.
That day was not yet over
when dogs rose up as one,
charging the winding road
of ancient Temozón.
At the end there lay a cenote,
a young woman bathed within;
each time she tried to climb out,
the dogs drove her back in.
At sunrise, down she went,
into a cenote, deep as the sea,
while Ek Balam—the black-eyed beast—
received her fated plea.
Over time the hounds of conquista
turned into starving strays;
the Mayans pass them silently—
no kind words left to say.
The cenote’s cliffs were steep,
the hounds were fierce and fast.
There was no shallow ground,
no place the girl could rest.
The dogs of Temozón, for eternity,
condemned to loiter under the sun,
never to rest, but to suffer—
the curse of Ek Balam.
Stas Holodnak is a Brooklyn-based writer and sailor whose work drifts between myth, memory, and the sea. Born in Ukraine and long settled in the United States, he writes about the pull of water and history, from the cenotes of Yucatán to the tides of Coney Island. His essays and poems have appeared in SwimSwam, Neon Origami, and Let’s Be Wild. A lifelong lover of open water, Holodnak explores the way place and legend intertwine—how landscapes remember what people forget. Recently, he completed a solo circumnavigation of Staten Island in a 14-foot Sunfish dinghy, a voyage that continues to echo through his writing.
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