Poetry in English

Poems by Patrick Sylvain

Fragmented

Autumn’s scattered dreams,
Undressed dreads down to the roots.
I am strewn like leaves.

Toes

Bare toes laugh out loud
At twisted French leather shoes.
They are chimerical.

(English translation by Elizabeth Brunazzi)

—Patrick Sylvain From the trilingual anthology, This Land, My Beloved, ed. Trilingual Press, 2023)

Poem by Ella Turenne

Middle Passage

In the horizon a dove soars
Scoping the open waters
Blessing the souls that lay below
They endured unspeakable hardships
These misplaced and misled people
Divine spirit captured them as they fell
Off rickety boats
While the rest of their family
Survived and arrived
In Saint Domingue.
Bienvenue! This is the New World.
Wealthy, coveted, watched, exploited
Saint Domingue.
Tragic cycle
Work, die, import
Import, work, die
Die, import, work.
The misery of slavery
Birthed through the middle passage.
Gone are the times we sail for fun
Along our ageless shores
With their golden sugar waves
These vessels carry us to distant coasts now
Far from the life we know
Far from our ancestor watch
Their arms reach out over miles
But sometimes are not long enough
To catch the ones who fall
All we have now is what is in our hands
Precious cargo of life and
Scribbles on paper
Tickets to a freedom
We thought we once had
Now lost
We are seeking elsewhere.
We don’t travel over rainbows
But there is a pot of gold at the end of this journey
If we can hold on long enough.
We had no choice about where we were born
The waters that surrounded the land where we lived
Should be red with the life fluid of our ancestors
The water that was supposed to protect our people
Nourish them
Cleanse them
Turned out to be the enemy
Preventing them from reaching
Shores where liberty reigns
A dream can become reality
So what we came over in boats?
Who bought us here in the first place?
My people were never water people
On mountainous terrain
In the middle of the ocean
They were never equipped to survive in rapids and waves
But they made it across the same waters
Their ancestors were forced to weather
Clutching the edge of a wooden piece of hope,
They looked out into the hungry mouth of the ocean
And peered straight into the souleyesspirit of the Lwa
Long ago engulfed by these unforgiving waters
Those same Spirits cannot be forgotten and
Their energy cannot be broken and
The womb that is the middle passage
Still has not healed
Still moans with the voices
Of thousands of vocal chords
United in cries for freedom
An energy that looms over
Even the calmest of waters
That energy rages under my skin
Keeping me connected
Reminding me that there was a before me
And that there is a with me
Even thousands of miles away.

—Ella Turenne English translation by Elizabeth Brunazzi, From the trilingual anthology, This Land, My Beloved, ed. Trilingual Press, 2023)

Poems by Danielle Legros Georges

Poem for the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere

O poorest country, this is not your name.
You should be called beacon and flame,
almond and bougainvillea, garden
and green mountain, villa and hut,
girl with red ribbons in her hair,
books under arm, charmed by the light
of morning, charcoal seller in black skirt,
encircled by dead trees.
You, country, are merchant woman
and eager clerk, grandfather
at the gate, at the crossroads
with the flashlight, with the light,
with the light.

—Danielle Legros Georges From the trilingual anthology, This Land, My Beloved, ed. Trilingual Press, 2023)

Poems by Vilvalex Calice

Wingless Sparrow

Clipped wings, voiceless sparrow,
Sings endlessly, hoping to be heard one day,
Through the walls of his death-row cage.
Well-versed by now in the pseudoscience
Of prison’s conversations with oneself,
Tired of the malversations of correction,
Decides to bounce echoes of his voice
Against walls, bars, hearts, and minds,
To discover a world non-porous to the truth.
Voiceless sparrow ignores silent disdain.
Knowing he can’t afford to give in or give up,
He keeps picking on the bars till his beak bleeds.
“My dear friend”, says a bird in the next cage,
“I have watched you try to fly without wings,
I have watched you try to sing without a voice.
I’ve watched you chew on iron bars. Enough!
Insanity is always doing the same things
Over and over, expecting different results.”
“Insanity is doing absolutely nothing,”
Replies the sparrow,
“Expecting nothing, haplessly resigned
to one’s fate”
“Those who broke down the walls of Jericho
Knew nothing of the science of sound waves,”
He added, a bit perplexed.
He refuses to perish in the clutches of silence
Engulfing the fissures of a murderous night.
He knows malfeasance is afraid of the light
And constantly ruminates perverse refrains
Of its faddish, absurd parody of justice.
It clings ever so firmly to its victim’s soul.
He often wonders: How long does it last?
The cheap thrill of another’s death.
The sparrow knows the truest intendments
Of the heart without mediation from the brain,
Beyond the listening threshold of jailers,
Malefactors, killers, and others of that ilk;
Beyond their grasp lies the pregnable truth.
Voiceless sparrow sings straight to the heart,
With a voice that commands us all to uphold
The sanctity of life, to make a better choice
In finding the redemptive values of the soul.
So, sing, brave sparrow,
Sing against the tempest.
Sing to change the molecular structure
Of our opaque, non-porous consciences.
Fly high and away, wingless sparrow,
Using your mighty invisible wings,
The wings no one can ever clip.

—Vilvalex Calice Georgia USA

Eletion Day Massacre

Their hearts harbored aspirations,
Similar to that of expecting mothers,
Their pain fading to an afterthought
With the greatest anticipation
Of the awaiting birth of Democracy,
After a long, long gestation.

The heavens cooperated fully,
The sky discarded its somber overall
For a very pretty light blue gown.
The sun was also in attendance, smiling.
Everyone was in their Sunday’s best,
Wore the same heartwarming smile.
There was an ubiquitous contagion of joy
In the long lines to the polling sites.

Suddenly, behind a thick veil of dust,
Car engines growled angrily.
Men with guns, with halos of rage,
Hate dancing in the white of their eyes.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
Uzis* chanting the hymn of Death.
Shots crackled, children moaned.
Bullets ripped flesh, spent shells flew.
Blood gushed in a rush
To stain the World’s Conscience.
Bodies piled up high to obfuscate Hope.

Dreams crumbled under stamping feet.
People’s cries rode waves of fear for years.
Their dried up tears, still here,
Desiccated watermark of long gone
Well in the middle of a desert,
Tattooed, etched on lifeless faces.

Death came and went, in an instant,
Incognito to bring us Anarchy.

Democracy was murdered once again
In plain daylight clarity, but
Its spirit has escaped unharmed,
Took refuge in the hearts of Haitians.

Since then, I have been harboring
This fugitive from injustice,
In the depth of my heart.

Uzi*. Israel- made compact sub-machine-gun.

(Sunday November 29. 1987. Georgia USA

Poverty Pimps and Their Gangs

The truth about heroes and zeros.
They say: “time is money.”
I say: No sir, not here, not anymore.
After embarking on long, tiresome,
Fruitless journeys through
The quagmires of hard time,
Young men from my homeland
Kill time effortlessly, easily on a daily basis:
Standing on street corners, doing nothing,
Drowning pains of joblessness
By long sips and bottom-up gulps,
Greeting awful taste of cheap rum
With disdainful grimaces and grunts
As self-inflicted punishments;
Contorting features and distorting faces.
Their eyes, blood-red from the smoke
That takes their hopes out of reach.
Tomorrow entwined in a presentist fate.
The dice is cast for the masses.

When the poverty pimps come around,
The political sale pitch is always the same:
Selling false Hope like dope for the soul,
Turning future young heroes into zeroes.
According to the villain’s Mathematics:
1 zero times 1 million is equal to a big zero,
An unequivocal, time-proven theorem.
Because in the arithmetics of the ghetto,
Rumors of plans and supposed solutions
Always held a product of zero.

Someone says:
Time is a tyrant.
The lifespan of the poor is its fiefdom.
Yet one of the functions of time
Is to occupy the lives of men and women.
Not to reign over penurious lives with terror,
With greed, neglect and apathy
As its faithful acolytes.
Where I come from, you’re ostracized
For killing this ageless tyrant.

Zeroes only count
When they hide behind some 1.
We need
9 of them behind 1 one
To reach a cool million.
Stop wasting time and money on booze
So you can wake up from this snooze.
Zero is a concept of nullity.
Flip the script, be the ones, the heroes.
Dump the goddamn weapons,
Stop the rapes, the kidnapping, the killing.
There are, absolutely, no zeros here.
Everyone is the one.
In the ultimate quest for progress
Truth is the sine qua non postulation
In this societal construct of heroes and zeros.

My Lactiferous Rose

We stand so close to each other’s soul
I can see angels dancing in your eyes.
I want to hold you so, so tight,
To trap twinkling of stars and moonlight
In a darkness of our own invention,
And just find our ways in this ebon night,
With sensual acuities and tactile eloquence.

Our whispers ride waves of silence,
Just below the murmurs of the wind,
Yet beyond the auditory threshold
Of all curious nocturnal creatures.
But never mind the trees,
Trees are well-known to die,
Keeping secrets in their rings.
Darkness has made us a promise:
To be our loyal confidante tonight.
And like these naked flowers,
Let’s dispose of our clothes,
For later we may laugh
At these puerile gestures.

To find shelter for our homeless feelings,
Let’s embrace and enlace in this placid place,
As our hearts race to shorten the journey
Between breaths, breasts and beyond.

My nocturnal rose, spread wide your petals,
To absorb the moonlight, your sustenance,
Flowing here generously, in abundance.
I’ll fend off pollinators and nectarivorous predators,
Anxious to devour the quintessence of your elixir.
I will break down, gently, trellises of abstinence
And allow your vital substance to overflow
The rims of the chalice of love.

—Vilvalex Calice Georgia USA

Poem by Tontongi

The Children at Aganman’s Gate1

Horrified and crying
in sudden appearance
at Aganman’s gate
the children take refuge
in their tears
to appease their sadness.

They were told that the long journey
toward the vast Unknown
while not made of roses
would end in a marvelous feast.

The children didn’t know a thing
about Versailles, Berlin, Hiroshima,
and not even nearby Guantanamo.
even less about Afghanistan,
Iraq or Syria, Gehenna enclaves
where the killers’ dance has no end.

The children were told at the end
their amiable Uncle from the North
would be there with his charming
embrace to welcome them with joy;
they didn’t know that our world
could be such a mean place.

They did not know that Auschwitz
would be less of a memory
than a continual menace
to those still dreaming of freedom.
They could not know,
that the parental warmth
experienced until then
would be ending so soon.

The children’s cry is the cry of silence
made recluse behind closed doors;
they’re sending us echoes of the kind
of pain felt when giving life to them;
their cry exposed what was supposed
to be faded away incognito,
in the never-happened ethereal world.

Their cry is a verdict
against pretending otherwise,
their cry compels us to ask
what happened to Mom and Dad,
and how come they are not there with them?
Why their voice is not heard
by those with such power to hurt?

Their cry implores us to inquire
about what happened to their childhood,
to their innocence once made sacrosanct
in moral manuals sold to the converted?
How come their land turned out to be yours
and the Rio Grande where their ancestors
washed their clothes are still awash in blood?

The children didn’t know that
the land was never yours from the start;
they didn’t know that it could ever exist
among us such a glacial universe
nor if the Sun would for sure
escape climate change.

The children didn’t know that
you made it possible to mass arrest
thousands of people in one day
and cage them and their children
like animals farm in hellish,
tender-age concentration camps?
How could the children know
that hatred and killing
are being normalized
since five hundreds years ago?

The children didn’t know
that silence is consent in disguise
and that the process is made
to be heartless as an angry shark;
they didn’t know that, how could they?

The children didn’t anticipate
that horrors would be part of the scene,
they didn’t know that you wanted
an unjust society as your spoil.

The children didn’t know we could be
such willing and consensual sheep
to this emotionless specter that threatens
our lives through cultivation of our greed.

The children didn’t know we can also
elevate our moments of togetherness
toward aspirations and positive energies
that enhance the everyday meaning of living.

The children didn’t know
—how could they? —
that assholes exist everywhere
and that if we fight for what is right
there’s a chance to make a difference.

Footnote

1.	Aganman is an evil being in Haitian mythology.

—Tontongi June 20, 2018, from the author’s upcoming collection of Gaze Thunder, January 2025)

Poems by Doumafis Lafontan

Dear Haiti

You can dream too
This is the potential I want to awake,
Your soul.
Take your beauty into your own hands.
Expose her to the big screens so that everyone can see,
You are talented.
Being Haitian, it’s not magic, it’s a gift.
Even if others say otherwise.
Frankly, their opinions don’t matter.
Actually, they’re wrong.
That which matters is who you really are.

The most important thing in the world right now,
Considering this huge crisis, (what we are going through)
Is the story you are telling.
The words, the others say about Haitians,
All the lies are no longer hidden

Show yourself off
Keep your balance on the tightrope of existence.
Free your heart
Don’t hold any grudge
Be as light as a feather
Walking on water,
It is not a miracle.
It is the way you live.

The link between birth and death is Liberty.
Where it exists in you, no one,
Not an animal,
Or anything can defile it,
Your inner strength.
They might try, but it is a waste of time
You are what Haiti is to you.

(2021)

Boukman’s prayer

(an adaptation of a song by Azor)

Boukman, oh at Bois Caïman
We address you
We don’t divert you
At Bois Caïman
Oh Father Boukman
We have had enough
Oh Father Boukman
We have moved ahead so far
The country is divided
Our families are split up
You did not initiate Bois Caïman
For us to serve foreigners.
(2021)

—Doumafis Lafontan From the trilingual anthology, This Land, My Beloved, ed. Trilingual Press, 2023)

Poems by Michèle Voltaire Marcelin

Migrant Heart

Prologue
Forced by circumstances beyond their control, men, women, and children navigate through unfamiliar terrains, in journeys without a fixed end-point, journeys etched into the earth, with courage and determination.

Migrants carry the weight of dreams on their shoulders, even as they forge a path through dangerous uncertainty.

Forced to flee their homes by conflict, famine, and persecution, what awaits them? Desperation, exhaustion, violence, the moral injustice of their families being separated, imprisoned, and inhumanely punished.

Amidst the ever-changing landscape of life, theirs is a profound tale of survival, of the resilience of the human spirit, of the relentless tenacity of hope, and of the continued beating of their heart. Migrant Heart

Crossing borders and boundaries in the direction of light
My migrant heart plays its part from memory
I am here and I wait
I wait
And memories come to me tonight
Of real and imagined journeys and odysseys
Of arrivals and departures
Memories come as the night falls
Of forced-on migration
Forced interruption of journeys
Separate trajectories long in distance and time
Unfolding in the absence of rhyme
Continually changing directions for reasons beyond imagination

In the transient dance of migration
Souls traverse borders like whispers in the wind
Seeking solace in the spaces between destinations

In the rhythm of transit
The weight of the journey meets the willingness to endure
Each footfall echoes a tale of resilience
Of lassitude, hunger, humiliation, and violence

Boundaries blur like shadows in the shifting light
The journey itself becomes a destination
Stories unfold, intersect, and diverge
A mosaic of stories of hazardous journeys
On the edges of hardship
On the edges between anguish and surrender
My migrant heart plays its part from memory
I am here and I wait
I wait
And I pray this new country receives me.

(February 2024)

Song

(The Minustah discharging human sewage in the Artibonite river in 2010 provoked one of the deadliest cholera outbreaks of the 21st century. By 2018, over 800,000 cholera cases had been reported and up to an estimated 10,000 people had died.)

Death seeps into my dreams
Water sweet poison
Changing color
Draining its dark stench
Bowel green
Rice water

Grey as the empty sky
As corpses I travel over
No Requiem No Libera me domine
Corpses
Soaked and dissolved in water
Grey rice water bowel green
Seeping bleeding drenching flooding
Into this island of ceaseless wonders
Closed open closed
Open to the sea water
And the Artibonite river

I would like to float
Even in a paper boat
Away from these senseless sorrows
I carry
My back breaking
From the grievous load
Of life denied withheld
And death without ritual or funeral
Through much whispering and loneliness
Homesickness lovesickness watersickness
O my island of endless distress
Bathed in shitwater no metaphor will do
Sometimes I am dazzled by your beauty
But you are a lump of sadness in my throat
It is grey outside

Dead grey sky
Wind flapping sheets
Spreading the smell of death
From a woman like me unlike me
Soaking the dark dirt with water
Bowel green rice water grey
Until it reaches the bowels of the earth
Till relentlessly life comes to a standstill
Leaving her with sightless sunken eyes
And shriveled skin

My island of seven plagues and maladies
Holding me and my memories
In a slow swelling blister of waste oozing solid-liquid
My island of cyclical crises
I love you through the stench of death
As if devoid of the sense of smell
As others void bowel green water rice water grey
Soaking you in shitwater
No metaphor will do
I weep over the empty sky

(2012)

A Song for the Living

We’re living in dark times
Sings the Poet
Yet she is not hopeless

Inscribed on her skin
Flowing from her blood
Echoed like a prophecy by her voice
Emerges a Song for the Living

O my Country, O My Love
We are not alone
We’ve survived the unsurvivable
Trusting in the promise of brighter days
We remember and we renew our History
With hearts wide open
We plant new Seeds
And herald the return of the Sun

Seeds of Courage and of Hope
Seeds of Resistance
And with Patience
We wait for Daybreak
Morning’s Awakening
When the Sun will rise over the Mountain

Seeds Despite infelicities and tragedies
We nurture seeds of Resilience
Honoring the Past
Standing in the Present
Embracing the Change to come
O my Country, O My Love
We are not alone
We’ve survived the unsurvivable
Trusting in the promise of brighter days
We remember and we renew our History
With hearts wide open
We plant new Seeds
And herald the return of the Sun

In the stillness, the Poet greets the dark
Yet she is not hopeless
Against the tide of the world
She proclaims the day has come
To reclaim our Future
Inscribed on her skin
Flowing from her blood
Echoed like a prophecy by her voice
Emerges a Song for the Living
As Day will break
The Sun will rise over the Mountain
And will come a time of Restoration
And will come a new Generation
Spirits aligned with the Essence of our being
Transformed into who we were destined to become
And proclaims the Poet,
Now, now the people entire will sing a Song for the Living

—Michèle Voltaire Marcelin