A HAITI FUGUE

HAITI POEMS

1. ALIVE IN HAITI

PORT-AU-PRINCE --- French rescuers pulled a teenage girl...very dehydrated, with a broken left leg and moments from death...from the rubble of a home near the destroyed St. Gerard University on Wednesday (January 27). a stunning recovery 15 days after an earthquake devastated the city...Darlene Etienne, 17, was rushed to a field hospital...groaning through an oxygen mask with her eyes open in a lost stare. ---The Toronto Star, January 28, 2009, Catastrophe in Haiti.

 

DARLENE ETIENNE, 17

How will your story be told, Du-du cheri,

Without the Lazarus lore tacked on it,

Limbs now freed of crucifying rubble?

In the terrifying gloom of broken days

Or broken nights, whichever endless waking

Found a harbour from pain, wherever fear

Dragged you to a cliff where you could smell

The brine of the bay and hear the muffled

Urgency of a gecko's staccato counting time

Where time sits still between shadows seen

Through cracked spaces and ebbing groans,

Did you cry for a little more time, pray for

A little more light, sing childhood lullabies

Or whistle for the wind: Mon Dieu, a cri d'couer

A lonely whisper echoing from walls fallen

In other rooms, other voices hushed in silent

Anger: O, St. Gerard, O, Mother of God,

Salve, salve, salve. Seigneur, Mon Dieu! Salve!

 

 

But you have become like your shattered country,

Darlene --- these wounds shall not hurt you,

Like La Belle Haiti endured the penury lashed deep

Upon the gnarled backs of peons singing creole

Songs in the wind-swept canefields verdant

With razor-edged leaves that hide their tears

From their carousing children who would one day

See a Haiti free, Le Isle de Hispaniola an isle

Shorn of the filthy gens d'armes, the rowdy Yanqui,

And Mon Dieu, from the ladrones of the Spanish

Galleon who harvested both garlic and gold,

Or traded peons young and old for pesetas to lick

The fetid hands of donnas, duennas, damas

Y caballeros sin caballos, sin verguenza, y

Todos barbaros de Francia, Espana, y America!

Basta ya, basta ya, las barbaridades!

 

The shackles of this temblor will not hurt you,

Darlene, but the garrottes of freedom will;

We know them now as dollars and cents, tourists

and tourism, just as your people paid back the Yanqui

Ransom that freed you from France, only to be yoked

By French-manque Duvaliers, or defrocked friars

Like Aristide --- horsemen of your apocalypse

That straddles your country's hills and laves your

Haiti's beaches and shores. To be free is to be enslaved.

 

But was your lost stare a confused reckoning

Of new found puissance? These rubble shall not bury

You, cheri, for you will rise scarred but ramrod certain

That rancour nurtured well in your heart and soul

For this rapier from Reapers unknown will invigorate you.

Though ripped and routed and retreating into some hell,

Your people will learn to rule a haven For Haitians,

As Haiti is for Haitians, and temblors be damned. 

 

2. A DEATH IN HAITI 

FABIANNE GEISMAR, 15

Shot dead for stealing mirrors.

---Headline, The Toronto Star, Catastrophe in Haiti, Jan 20, 2009, Pg. 19

 

While the temblor's carrion burn

in common graves unnamed,

you have a name to go by, and

will have confreres wail to mourn

your falling on brittle rubble,

mirror clutched as you would a rag doll

if you had a more innocent childhood,

if you even were a lass in pigtails

or braids or ribbons or princess veils,

and did not have to scrounge for food

or even think that a purloined mirror

is a prize too precious to die for. 

O, Fabianne, would you have seen

a flushed reflection of the fairest face

this wounded city has haplessly hidden

in unforgiving debris of shattered grace?

Or would you have recoiled from scars

on scars that faces become inured to

seen through cracks of shattered mirrors? 

 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA