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Forty percent of everything America imports in a container
passes through a fifty-mile ditch it gave away twenty-six years ago.

2
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Thirteen thousand ships a year, five percent of world trade,
all squeezing through lock chambers barely wider than the ships themselves.

3
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America built it under a treaty it wrote with a Frenchman,
not a Panamanian, and the word in that treaty was perpetuity.

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Carter signed it away in nineteen seventy-seven, and on the final day
of nineteen ninety-nine, at noon, Panama took the keys.

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Since then the canal has handed its owners thirty-one billion dollars,
and now funds nearly a quarter of everything the government collects.

6
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But the canal was never the whole prize — the ports at either end were,
and one Hong Kong company had held both since nineteen ninety-seven.

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Last year thirteen thousand crossings paid five point seven billion dollars
in tolls, the canal's strongest year since the drought nearly closed it.

8
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Because the canal runs on rainwater — in twenty twenty-three
the lake fell so low that Panama had to ration crossings for months.

9
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The fix is a one point six billion dollar dam, unfinished until
twenty thirty-two, that will move about two thousand five hundred people.

10
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Then this February Panama's supreme court voided the Hong Kong contract
outright, and by presidential decree both ports changed hands overnight.

11
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A Danish carrier took one, an Italian-Swiss carrier took the other,
and the company that lost them is now suing for two billion dollars.

12
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Panama owns the water; the ports keep changing hands. The canal stays
neutral only because everyone needs it more than they can hold it.