A Seismic Afternoon, Without Form, Without Name and Without End
We are going to dig to bury our dead:
Mother, father, sisters and brothers,
Uncles, aunts, friends and strangers.
We are going to inter our dead:
Archbishop, pastors, Houngans and vicars.
The altar boys in a row are profusely bleeding.
The cracked crucifixes are lying on the benches.
They weep, suffer and are all almost naked.
Oh! They breathe like humans in agony;
Things, they say, really have a life.
The corpses are bunglingly rotting.
The children are no longer afraid of the old people
Who died rocking on the antique armchairs, and on the chariots
Where countless clowns are squashed by the last explosion.
What a dismal hustle and bustle! What a wild hullabaloo!
The living room is a decorated cemetery.
The table is a moist and wet tabernacle
Of painful tears, precious blood and vital saliva.
The kitchen is bland, pale and innocuous.
What a disaster from the abyss to the shores!
This event has no form, no name.
This earthquake is second to none.
The students have lost everything: marbles and tokens,
Old desks and countless collections of poetry books.
This event has no form, no end.
The flowers are forlorn and the victims
Are scattered deep in the labyrinths,
Humming and singing the verses of the Antiquity.
Listen to their prayers and their complaints!
Listen to the delusions and the onomatopoeias!
We are going to bury our dead:
The old, the young and the babies.
We will bury our dead
Like degraded and desperate soldiers
Like immobile and immaculate braves.
P.S. Poem Revised For The 12th Anniversary of the 2010 Earthquake
In Haiti.
Copyright © January 2022, Hébert Logerie, All rights reserved
Hébert Logerie is the author of several books of poetry.