The Quiet Things
Some losses don’t arrive with the sound of thunder, they settle quietly, in places you once called ordinary.
The Quiet Things
They said grief was a river.
But it feels more like salt
staining the edges of everything,
Your hands,
the windows,
even the prayer beads left on the table
like, they, too, gave up counting.
Last night,
the wind moved through the house
as if it had something to say.
You almost asked it to stay,
to tell you what the walls had heard
when you weren’t listening.
There are altars everywhere now,
the kitchen sink
with its chipped porcelain
where the faucet leaks, slow as confession,
the cracked door
letting in a slice of light like a blessing
you aren’t sure you deserve.
You keep writing their name
in the margins of books
You’ll never finish,
like the act of writing
might call them back,
or at least make the silence
less still.
And when the moon comes,
thin and restless,
You wonder if she too remembers
how she once drowned herself
in the darkness,
just to feel holy.
Back to the Land
When someone leaves, their voice lingers in the ordinary, in memory, in residue, in the smallest corners, until the earth quietly takes them back again.
I keep finding your voice
caught in the teeth of the radiator
as if the heat knows you by name.
The curtains sway
like they’ve been drinking all night
and can no longer keep secrets.
I fold my hands the way someone
might hold a map in the dark,
waiting for a country
that doesn’t know they exists.
Outside, rain moves through the air,
dragging a wet light
across the face of every building,
like it is blessing or punishing something
I can’t see.
Made of Mangoes and Mourning
There are children who wake to the sound of nothing, and still believe in morning. Whose classrooms are sometimes the sky, sometimes the street— where lessons are written in dust instead of chalk.
This is for them—born of mangoes and mourning, a country that keeps breaking, but keeps singing anyway.
They say you came from the sun.
Slipped through the cracks of Jacmel‘s light,
breathed in the salty air
Let off the sound of drums,
Drums that beat like a second heart.
Born where mango trees lean like elders listening.
Where the sea sings in Kreyòl,
and even the wind
knows how to tell stories
Stories of gods,
Stories of ghosts,
Stories of women,
who birthed a
revolutions in silence.
Your first cry’s shook banana leaves.
Roosters crowed.
neighbors whispered
“Sa, sa se pa yon timoun nòmal.”
That child,
That child is not ordinary.
You were born in Saut-d'Eau
or maybe Gonaïves,
where the streets wear dust like pride,
where children learn to pray
before they learn to spell their own names.
Your lullabies?
Sirens and sermons.
Your cradle?
A tin roof beneath stars
that still remember Toussaint’s footsteps.
You
you are the child of broken things
that still dance.
Your mother
braided resistance into your hair,
sang prayer into your skin,
held you as if you were the last soft thing
left in the world.
Your father
In the home.
But never in the room.
Never in your heart.
Fed you food, but starved you of love,
But his blood still hums in your palms
when you touch the earth.
You drink from rivers
that once carried rage.
You run past walls
painted with hope
faded, but never gone.
You eat rice and beans
and a side of laughter
even when the lights cut out.
Even when school is a question
and the answer is maybe next year.
But still
you rise.
Every.
Single.
Morning.
You rise.
With a sun
too stubborn to stay down,
and a name
too sacred to forget.
You are Haiti’s child.
Woven from sugarcane and sorrow.
From lakou’s dust.
From the silence of ancestors
who speak
through your spine
When you hold your head up with pride.
You are made of sky,
or of dirt
or maybe both.
Of wind and wounds.
Of mangos and mourning.
They will try to name you
by your struggle.
Will say you are poor
as if your wealth
isn’t written in rhythm,
and rain,
and resilience.
Let them talk.
You know who you are.
You were born of a land
that remembers everything
even in rubble,
even in ruin.
And you?
You are still deciding
whether to carry the country on your back
or to let it lift you
into the sky.
Like the Sun
Becoming Again
A poem about the slow, tender war of returning to yourself- of remembering the person you were before the world renamed you.
Forgetting yourself is the simplest thing.
You loosen your grip,
let the world name you,
let time press you into something smaller,
something quieter,
something else.
You don’t even notice the leaving.
One day, you wake up a stranger
wearing your skin,
answering to a voice
that does not belong to you.
But coming back
that is the war.
It is digging through the wreckage,
pulling your bones from the dust,
learning the language of your own mouth again.
It is choosing yourself
in a world that never taught you how.
It is calling your name
until it feels like home.