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