WHEN WE CELEBRATE IN THE DIASPORA

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

PORT-AU-PRINCE, 13 August 2024 – At least 131 children, including babies, have been reported killed or injured in Haiti during violent attacks against their neighbourhoods or clashes between armed groups and the police so far in 2024, Save the Children said. According to an analysis of UN verified data, an average of five children a week in the first six months of 2024, have been killed or injured by armed violence in Haiti. However, the true number of child casualties is likely to be much higher.  —Save the Children

Our hearts flood in joy like turtles
in shells in the sea. We're flying high
but then, your real story flashes.

No fireflies in belly of your darkness.
We're scared. Your sacred beauty will
remain hidden in mountain peaks

our feet will never climb. Our tears
are quite predictable, they swell
like your turquoise sea. Salt on 

cheeks. We mourn each day we can't 
bask in your rising sun, sit in shade
of your palm trees. Stroll like lovers.

We don't have answers to questions.
"What's going on in your country?"
"What will it take to change Ayiti?"

Sleepless, on the eve of speaking about you.
I looked in a mirror, brushed my coarse gray hair.
Raised my chin. Smiled with full red lips for hope.

Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet born in Haiti, the author of eight books including her new book of poetry Coral in The Diaspora (Abode Press, August 2024).  Her poetry has been published and forthcoming in The New Verse News, Impspired, Urthona: Buddhism & Art, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & The Arts, Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, The Dewdrop. Poetica Review, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, The Caribbean Writer, West Trestle Review among others. Jerrice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2024 by Jerry Jazz Musician and as Best of the Net for 2022 by Blue Stem. She facilitates poetry workshops in New York where she lives.

WE, THE DIASPORA

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Haitian policemen stand guard on a street corner amid gang violence in Port-au-Prince on April 8,2024.

Last week, my colleagues and I facilitated healing circles for Haitians, both on the island and in the diaspora. In this virtual gathering, known as the Sawubona Healing Circle, we bore witness to the fullness and depth of our pain across different geographical locations. We held space for the fear experienced by those trapped in Port-au-Prince amidst paramilitary violence. We acknowledged the hurt felt by innocent people yearning for communal safety. We understood the confusion among a diaspora who craved to support their people but felt wholly inadequate to meet the urgency of their needs. —Evan Auguste, The Haitian Times, April 2, 2024

Haitian leaders have finalized a deal for a temporary government to steer their Caribbean nation out of gang-fueled chaos, but the details must first be approved by the outgoing authorities, Agence France Presse confirmed Monday. —VoA, April 8, 2024

We, the diaspora know
our lives to be bleak without heat of circular suns.
We, the diaspora know
our hands to be bare not plucking velvet red cherries. 
We, the diaspora know 
consequences of our silence will cause you to bleed.

Can we the diaspora pledge to
merge our voices eclipsed by a stubborn early moon?

Can we the diaspora pledge to 
baptize babies dressed in white holy silk by dusk?
Can we the diaspora pledge to
grow consciousness as yellow corn in indigo nights?

Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet born in Haiti, the author of eight books, and a forthcoming book of poetry called Coral in The Diaspora (Abode Press, August 2024).  Her poetry has been published and forthcoming in The New Verse News, Impspired, Urthona: Buddhism & Art, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & The Arts, Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, The Dewdrop. Poetica Review, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, The Caribbean Writer, West Trestle Review among others. Jerrice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2024 by Jerry Jazz Musician and as Best of the Net for 2022 by Blue Stem. She facilitates poetry workshops in New York where she lives.

TREE TRIPTYCH

by Beth Evans

 

Cuttings

 
I walked the yard recently,
Past the chickens,
You know them well by now,
The compost creators.
Walked until I saw the damaged Rose-of-Sharon.
 
A branch, several branches,
Hung bent to the ground,
Clinging to the center trunk
With shaving of themselves,
Like the first loose tooth of a child,
Hanging by a thread of flesh,
About to part company.
 
I ripped the clinging branches from their mother,
Threw them aside,
More compost,
Feedings for new life,
Leaving a wounded mother,
With one branch embedded, still,
At her side,
No sign of its leaving home.
The mother tree reaching up towards the sky,
Bare,
Bare of most of her branches,
Bare of most of the tender leaves
That the branches shoot out each year,
Year after year,
New every time,
The ever-changing interests and pursuits of her children.
But now they are gone.
As is their future.
 
I have heard,
That entire branches of families
Have been obliterated.
The mother, the father, the grandchildren,
The mother of them all, the grandmother.
Obliterated.
There will no longer be changing interests and pursuits.
There will no longer be their future.
 

Reachings

 
This tree,
This mother has wandering branches
That reach in an undulating choreography towards places,
Each other has never been.
They have their interests,
They follow their pursuits,
They live in their present
And towards their futures.
Not a single one has been cut down,
Though they all range far from the center,
Pilgrimage, the Hajj, Aliyah.
Risking annihilation in the
Moving winds of time and space.
The center holds.
I tell Yeats.
It is in their wandering,

Courage of exploration and redefinition,

That the core gains its strength.
 

Leavings

 
I woke this morning with a poem in my head.
                The black sheep
                Creep
                Away.
                They never fit in their flock.
                Do better in the outskirts,
                Do better where they find other black sheep,
                Or pink sheep,
                Or green sheep,
                Or no sheep at all.
                And find their home among the antelopes,
                Or the orangutans,
                Or even among the wolves.
 
My son has left me,
Gone to find his new home
In the mountains or the meadows or a desert,
Like the branches of the bush that now lie rotting in my yard,
Like the branches that leap from the undulating tree,
Like the sheep that leave the flock.
He tells me,
That when he has a daughter,
He will name her Rose of Sharon,
And he has not even read the Grapes of Wrath,
Or the Bible.
But he has walked in this same yard,
Past the chickens,
Past the wounded tree,
When in his day,
It grew strong and whole,
As wood should,
And he will still,
See a future,
And procreate.

The poet, Beth Evans, lives in Brooklyn, NY and writes with the Thursday Morning Poets. She holds a master's degree in English literature and works as an academic librarian. She is currently overseeing the care and maintenance of her son's 23 chickens in her urban backyard with her pitbull Chichi and her cat Shadow.

THE CROSSING

by John Valentine

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a ruling from a federal judge in Texas requiring the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration program that forces asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to await approval in Mexico…. The court’s three more liberal members—Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—said they would have granted a stay of the trial judge’s ruling…. The challenged program, known commonly as Remain in Mexico and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. After the policy was put in place at the beginning of 2019, tens of thousands of people waited for immigration hearings in unsanitary tent encampments exposed to the elements. There have been widespread reports of sexual assault, kidnapping and torture. —The New York Times, August 24, 2021. Photo: Olga Galicia and her family at a makeshift camp for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, near the border with the United States. Credit: Emilio Espejel/Associated Press via The New York Times.

The trail snakes north, coils

like a rattler.

Mindlessly moving in the glare  

of the sun, they go.

Diaspora bound. Weary,

everything left behind.

Hopeless. 

And here comes the hand

that says no. 

The one that refuses

The hand like a wall.

Thunder, rain up ahead. 

Lightning.    

The trembling. The reckoning.

All that they feared. 

The night. Its stillness.

The hand.  

And now

here comes the storm.

John Valentine lives in Savannah, GA, where he teaches aesthetics at a local art college.

DIASPORA SPEAKS

by Indran Amirthanayagam

A Palestinian girl in the rubble of her home in Gaza.Credit: Fatima Shbair/Getty Images via The New York Times, June 2, 2021

Who controls the narrative, the media space, the buzz?

Who dominates headlines, chats with editors, balances

the story? Who reduces trauma to numbers, who has not

experienced pulverizing stones, his parents' home razed

at close hand? You and I who read together in safe

countries, saved by fleeing parents in search of peaceful

neighborhoods to raise their children. Now, we face a cousin

across the water crying I want to be a doctor, a nurse,

to save my family, now this. What am I to do with this?

With this stone, this shrapnel, this broken washbasin?

What am I to do, to play hide and seek with ghosts?

Do something, people. Stop the killing now. Stop

the killing here, everywhere. Stop the killing.

The poem has a purpose, these words are not useless.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). Indran Amirthanayagam's Blue Window/ Ventana Azul, translated by Jennifer Rathbun,  is about to be published by Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

DIASPORA

by Risa Denenberg





I see them in nightmares, or when silent in meditation.
There, they were doctors, green-grocers, artists, stone masons.
Here, they snake around barricades like a river.

I don’t see them when I’m serving dinner to the homeless
in my home town on Christmas day, because after all,
I’m Jewish and have nowhere else to go.

I see them when I meditate, or hike a mountain trail.
There, they ate breakfast, went to jobs, read the daily, made love.
Here, they lie dead on highways like roadkill.

I don’t see them when I’m working in the clinic
offering unguents and kindness to soothe wounds,
then staying late to finish chart notes, weary and irritable.

I see them when I hike, or when I pray
(which I do sporadically and) mainly when I envisage them
streaming as a long bridge across sinister waters full

of vipers, swelling the roads to a town near you.
There, they were proud of their kids’ report cards.
Here they struggle, defenseless to save children from drowning.

I pray to see them and to not see them
because it’s so much worse than I can fathom
and I can’t imagine an act that could make it right.

I see them as my family, ghettoed in their Russian shtetel,
then, crossing the ravenous Atlantic to an unknown fate.

There, they prayed and were slaughtered.
Here, we forget to pray, and prosper.

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a small press that publishes poetry by lesbians. She has published three chapbooks and two full length books of poetry, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013) and Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016).