Poetry
A Song Of Haiti
1.
Alleluia Alleluia Amen
Alleluia Alleluia Amen
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
Sweaty gourdes and a Fanta sap my veins,
Knuckles ache, swelled, threading leather balls
To be skied aloft on another shore
Rich in the distance, supple in the flight.
Dull machete, carving furrows ‘round beans to roast,
Collects the rays to bury below bushes bent:
Forcing backs low, to squat reaching
With a handleless hoe
To dig deeper in the dark, in the black, in the hole.
Eyes down
Don’t look up if you want to see another sunrise
Eyes down
Don’t look up if you want to see
Eyes down
Don’t look up if you want to
Eyes down
Don’t look up
Eyes down
Don’t look
Eyes down
Don’t
Eyes down
Eyes down
Eyes down
Thirty-three chunks of termite bark
Hammered in the black on borrowed time
Angle a piece of September space
To span a moment merging ocean’s urges
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
2.
Shore dropping away in the blue,
Shackles release voices bellowing
Sails full of rapture, rafting fast
Away from black, feverish Haiti.
Unspied by the Tonton Macoute
Unheard in the rustle of bushes hiding
Muted gift of an open wave, away, rolling away.
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
Pray to Pierre-Dominique
To Toussaint L’ouverture
That our rising on the crest of splashing night waves
Might equal the success of the four thousand slaves
Who threw off the yoke and chanted to be free
Killing for the hope of the tribe’s ancestry
All the while begging penance of a voodoo trinity.
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
Thirty-three chunks of termite bark
Hammered in the black on borrowed time
Angle a piece of September space
To span a moment merging ocean’s urges
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
3.
Caps crash over the side, drenching,
Swirled by a wind, hurling boat forth and back,
Maps bleed colors, melting lead lines to a grayness,
To a dullness, to a deadness clutched in hand.
No use. What’s the use? Let the gusts
Flapping cloaks of a hungan, bursting
Courses unseen, uncharted, lead us away.
La terre a droite! Voila la terre a droite!
In the middle of the blackness howling
Palms wave an invitation, fronds summoning
Us to join them in blending with a Providence
Furied in power, a pathway storied
In the risings and fallings of men
Led questing through the clouds.
To land we leap wet in the cold.
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
Thirty-three chunks of termite bark
Hammered in the black on borrowed time
Angle a piece of September space
To span a moment merging ocean’s urges
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
4.
They call it Cayo Lobos, isle of the wolves:
Save for a tree and a few feathered birds
There’s nothing, but our tired limbs hungering
For a taste of peace beyond breath.
Lady loa Death has taken five in the swim,
But she let the bloated mothers float
Ashore, two babes bursting free
In an unhindered light far from Haiti.
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
No food. No water. But we shall last:
We’ve waited too long to let a fast
Deter us from breathing free
Deter us from breathing free
Nothing’s going to stop us gettin’ to
Nothing’s going to stop us gettin’ to
Nothing’s going to stop us gettin’ to Miami.
Thirty-three chunks of termite bark
Hammered in the black on borrowed time
Angle a piece of September space
To span a moment merging ocean’s urges
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
5.
Send us a devil, Jesus
To tempt us with some bread
Our faith is fading fast
With each babe dead we bury
In sandy graves we hurry
To fill before the tide rushes in.
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
Squatting for forty days
On rusted blades and soup lids
Fists cling and sticks sharpen
To counter the nightsticks and the gasmasks
And the flasks of powdered milk dropped from ‘copters
Like bait tossed squirming to a floating fish.
Blood spills again for a price.
Under the crack of birch clubs
Bloody welts quick-swell flaky skin
Eight run for the tide, to be
Carried to death sooner than Haiti
Herded under machine gun eye
A memory of a Bantu tribe
Shackled a century before
We lie on deck, eyes down.
Don’t look up if you want to see another sunrise
Eyes down
Don’t look up if you want to see
Eyes down
Don’t look up if you want to
Eyes down
Don’t look up
Eyes down
Don’t look
Eyes down
Don’t
Eyes down
Eyes down
Eyes down
Thirty-three chunks of termite bark
Hammered in the black on borrowed time
Angle a piece of September space
To span a moment merging ocean’s urges
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen.
Alleluia Alleluia Amen
Alleluia Alleluia Amen
Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Amen
*Mwah Gran Gou (Haitian Creole for I’m really hungry.)
(Written in May 1981, after Haitians who had spent 40 days on Cayo Lobos were forced back to Haiti in November 1980)
NASSAU, the Bahamas, Nov. 12 (1980) (AP) --Bahamian police officers armed with nightsticks and semi-automatic weapons stormed the tiny island of Cayo Lobos today to force 102 marooned Haitians onto a Bahamian boat scheduled to take them back to Haiti.
Michael Varga 1981
Share
Recent Posts
September 11, 2024
When You’re An Outlier
Often the word “outlier” is used in cancer treatment to describe a patient who beats the odds and lives longer than expected. Those...
September 3, 2024
The Bunny on Wilton Drive
A sculptor shares his Thunder Bunny. The Blueness of it hints of hidden graces. Pedestrians pass it daily, hardly looking, And to them,...
June 17, 2024
When A Government Totters
In the middle of an exam, my Chadian students suddenly stood up and fled my classroom. A minute before, they had seen through...