American sentence: "child in bed"

With a headlamp on, god watch my night. And all parents think is the moon.

Earthquake

such great stretches of dreamscape
such lines of all too familiar lines
staved in
caved in so the filthy wake resounds with the notion
of the pair of us? What of the pair of us?
Pretty much the tale of the family surviving disaster:
“In the ancient serpent stink of our blood we got clear
of the valley; the village loosed stone lions roaring at our heels.”
Sleep, troubled sleep, the troubled waking of the heart
yours on top of mine chipped dishes stacked in the pitching sink
of noontides.
What then of words? Grinding them together to summon up the void
as night insects grind their crazed wing cases?
Caught caught caught unequivocally caught
caught caught caught
head over heels into the abyss
for no good reason
except for the sudden faint steadfastness
of our own true names, our own amazing names
that had hitherto been consigned to a realm of forgetfulness
itself quite tumbledown.
© Aimé Césaire
[source...]

Death, by Félix Morisseau-Leroy

Whenever I have nightmares
It's the tonton macoutes I'm dreaming about
The other night I dreamed
They made me carry my coffin on my back
Everyone on all the Port-au-Prince streets was laughing at me
There were 2 or 3 boys not laughing
The other night I dreamed
They made me dig my grave in the cemetery
Everyone on television was laughing at me
There were 2 or 3 girls not laughing
The other night I dreamed
A macoute squad was getting ready to shoot me
Everyone was laughing
There was an old woman who wasn't laughing
Those little boys and girls there -
If I say more the devil will steal my voice
The old woman
Is Shooshoon Fandal
They brought her to see the macoutes shoot
Her 5 sons on a street in Grand Gosier.
© Félix Morisseau-Leroy, "Shooshoon." Translation from Creole by Jack Hirschman and Boadiba.
[source...]

Earthquake in Haiti

seems jesus
& his big daddy
both white men / to me

else what the hell do that pair / have
against the poor
& brown
& free

the pale trinity
hz crushed haiti in their fist
did it feel as good as phuket
tsunami / quake / or lava
what jacks them off the best

long bone fingers at the throb
aiming down on new orleans

jesus is a white man / i'm sayin
jesus is now a white man / to me
© Maxine Beneba Clarke

[source...]

Vacation

I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.
© Rita Dove
[source...]

Fragments out of the deluge. V.

On an empty sarcophagus
hewn out of alabaster,
A branch of fennel on an
empty sarcophagus...

Nothing suggests accident
where the beast
Is finishing her rest...

Smoke of ultramarine and amber
Floats above the fields after
Moonlit rains, from tree unto tree
Distils the radiance of a king...

You might as well see the new branch of Enkidu;
And that is no new thing either...
© Christopher Okigbo

[source...]

Last Year

Because Samson was red bird in a tree full
of blackbirds, because one night she cried and he wiped
her tears with his hair, because she wanted his power
to come from her, because he lay down with her again
again— even after she warned him, even after
the dream, she knew love only swam
in the nude because after he took off every
garment he was still fully clothed, that spring
trees threw rice over her head,
littered the ground with pale blossoms— see
it’s complicated, because she always wanted a prince,
a boy, because after she lost the baby he rocked her
as she moaned, kicked, as she punched, as she bled, because he
lied to her about so much, because she wanted to be his superstition,
his voodoo, his wellspring, because she thought she
could keep the walls from crumbling, that she
would be the last prayer on his tongue.
© Ama Codjoe
[source...]

Dennis Brutus Memorial in Philly

Sunday, 10 January at 2:00 pm
Moonstone Arts Center
110A S. 13th Street
Philly, PA

Free

Contact: 215-735-9600
http://www.moonstoneartscenter.org
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/brutus261209.html
[source...]

Timbuktu

"At its height, from the 11th to the 15th centuries, [Timbuktu] was a university town with vast libraries. Scientists here were postulating that the earth was round at a time when many European sailors were terrified of sailing off the edge of an earth that they thought was flat."
[continue there...]

Poems in Asili

Click me

Seen on Geoffrey's blog

Midnight at the close of this year,
my mother's spirit urges me
to entrust my sorrows to the sea.

"To Become Green Again and Young"
~ Lorna Goodison

Forgiving is good