There’s a clockless hour in Port-au-Prince,
thick with the iron perfume of dust and rain,
Where the last rooster crows atop a roof made of rags and blue tarpaulin pain,
You can hear the hymn of the living digging by candle, hands blistered raw,
Cursing the way cement falls heavier than sin,
and love is measured by what you’re willing to claw,
Auntie Martine’s rosary buried beside a mattress pressed flat as a gravestone,
Children trading prayers for rice, or scraps of tin,
or a corner of shade to call their own.
Ghosts gather at the cemetery gate, looking for bodies with their names,
You see them in the open wounds of the city, counting heads, whispering blames,
A father’s shout is a shovel’s bite,
slicing through brick for the promise of flesh,
All the saints are busy, all the churches cracked,
and every heartbreak is fresh,
The sun keeps rising, cruel and bright, over tent cities stretched along tombs,
Every aftershock a warning that you can never go back,
only forward, carrying too many rooms.
A baby is born in a field hospital, screaming into a world of broken floors,
Her mother bites a stick to bear down, eyes locked on God —
one hand gripping hope, the other the tent’s torn doors,
There’s a grave dug with bare feet behind every broken wall,
Grandmothers weep in the street,
names chalked on plywood, waiting for some miracle call,
The living barter for water, share grief like an old family song,
Nobody here mistakes survival for luck,
nobody here believes the world is strong.
There are memories buried beneath every stone, names swallowed by mud,
History written on cardboard signs,
begging in three languages for something better than blood,
Foreign news crews come for a minute,
but the real story is told in creole and sweat,
It’s carved into knuckles and knees,
the lines of those who have nothing to forget,
A boy sits on the rubble that used to be school,
shoes lost, eyes rimmed in white,
Learning his arithmetic from the cracks in the street,
praying his hunger won’t last through the night.
After the cameras, after the saints, after the hope trucks sputter away,
The city still pulses—an open wound,
a thousand hands searching for someone to say
That this, too, is holy: the bones of family beneath the cinder and bone,
A kitchen table crushed flat but set for dinner,
a mother’s lullaby through stone,
Names scrawled in charcoal on sheet metal walls,
a headstone for all that’s been taken,
A promise that when the earth shakes,
the living will answer, and the dead are never forsaken.
Tremors in the night, and still the candles burn,
Every tent a memory, every grave a lesson you learn,
Faultlines in the bones, histories written in scars,
The earth can swallow a nation, but can’t dim their stars.
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