By Tolu Ogunlesi
Is Haiti a page
torn out of a Book
by Someone who thought
This doesn’t belong here,
and got angry
at being cheated?
Is Haiti that Book,
sitting limply
in a rain of televised dust
trampled underfoot by bewildered bodies
for whom life and the afterlife
now share one side of a coin
Is Haiti Atlantis Reloaded –
death this time by debris; one endless moment
of misfortune? Ta ta. Two hundred thousand
unrequited goodnights, uttered swifter
than the speed of darkness
in a land locked in by History, lit
by pity, lost in the glare of camera lights
II
By the rivers and ruins of Haiti
I sit and sing of restless spirits
rehearsing a re-enactment of 1804;
of Emancipados swollen with dreams
of their children pummeling
the stubborn children of Code Noir
III
The Book bleeds
but still it holds on to its meaning
Its pages swell with alien pity
but still the characters that inhabit them rise
like the land that threw them off balance
still they sing
still they attempt to dance
even when the music watches
from a safe, safer, safest, distance…
still…
*
This poem appears in A LIME JEWEL – Anthology of Poems and Short Stories in aid of Haiti, edited by Yetunde Ruban, and published in London in October 2010. Order it on Amazon, here
Tolu Ogunlesi 