Haiti

Haiti is an accident;
I prefer not to look at it.
Mangled parts abound;
Nothing astounds.

You see, the sun is too bright;
The skin and bones too tight.

Though Wilson sent Marines
To instill a sense of order –
The milat, moun andeyo,
And all that negritude –
Too much, too much,
They bust the motor.

And all through the years
The parts have tumbled
Down deforested hills:
Estime, Vincent, Magloire,
Lescot, and Duvalier.

And who will care?

Where have you gone, Daniel Fignole?
The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Mesdames et messieurs,
Gens de couleur:
Start your engines.

But they have nowhere to go,
Surrounded by the wide, wide sea,
Where the sun sets too bright
And the skin, bones, too tight.

Around the Block

When I was a boy
I used to walk around the block
So many times far
From the ticking clock.

Around the bend there was the house
Of our neighbors; the two older boys
Who washed their cars, and when wet
Their sex showed, hanging, as they’d bend
Those tall spindly legs moving awkward, and alien,
Like the Martian invaders in War of the Worlds.

Around the bend again, there was the house
Across the street, across the border,
Where lived the brown boy, that other.
He was not like us kids, white brown,
But from South America, brown brown.
And so we launched stones and taunts
Like missiles launched from our starship
That launched from the tree in our yard
Lurching at light speed to escape the dark
And the calls for dinner.

Around the bend again there was the house
Of all those children but we never saw the father
Except in stories of drinking and sleeping and jail.
But we let one of them play with us;
Not the others, though, they were babies, and a girl.

Around the bend again there was the house
Across the street, an ocean away,
Where the woman sat on her porch quiet.
They said she was an old Russian lady,
A little girl in the Russian Revolution,
Though none of us knew where that was.
So she was the silent witch from Oz.

When the radio played static,
When my mother’s shoe caught my brother’s head,
When my father bellowed in the living room
And my sister cried in her bed,
I walked around the block
To escape the ticking clock.