Nightmare

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The children with no names lay mute in a corner of the General Hospital grounds Tuesday, three among thousands of boys and girls set adrift in the wake of Haiti's earthquake. V. Sequera & B. Fox, Associated Press, Jan 26/10



The language of disaster
left them without speech.

This multiple death needs
to be washed away

by this facetious ceremony of tears
flowing through rivers of blood

on lonely roads of freed prisoners
through oceans of sorrow in parched earth

even as this heartland cracks
and cracks so to eat up

what remnant there is
to make us remember

what repeated and repeatable
bad luck is to die without saying goodbye

on a day when a holy bishop
in his palace leaves us as well.

Many others follow the same route
to extinction, common and senseless,

beyond forgiving, this and heartless
beyond remembering, past pains.

Now those who survived
feast on the final pity, lots of those

if only to get by each day
when moonrises do not come

to cool the warm and old days
that are for the kill

like a swarm of flies lustily
buzzing around with their music

busy with the pus springing from flesh
rotting on the wayside, offering

what pus can offer, what decay
and its mutations are in the mortal

wounds of this nighmare
we cannot name, never.

The flies come with their declamations
of death. They announce the impossibility

of one last dance for grace
in life as in its end.

We try to dream, dream on.
But the nights and the sleep

this one last sleep
no longer comes.