A Sharecropper’s Pantoum
—for a dry season
The drug cocktails that have slashed the mortality rate of
HIV-positive people in the U.S. and Western Europe are
all but non-existent in Haiti. [O]nly 3 to 4 percent of
people with AIDS [there] have access to the newest drugs.
—Alfredo S. Lanier, The Chicago Tribune, 2003
Hauling this pine box on a black Chevrolet,
I pray to a candle at the end of its wick.
White burial clothes in a garbage bag,
I ride for a place to die.
I pray to a candle at the end of its wick
on the mud road home from Port-au-Prince
and ride toward a place to die
where mangoes hang and sugarcane turns.
By the dust road home from Port-au-Prince,
I am a black skeleton—6 feet tall, yet 90 pounds—
where mangoes hang and sugarcane burns.
I turned the earth before I got this thing.
A lesioned skeleton—a rainbow tall, now 70 pounds—
I dream across the waters and of the miracles there
and turn to earth in the jaws of this thing:
eyes—black holes, lungs—green clouds.
Dreaming across the waters and of the miracles there,
white burial clothes in a garbage bag,
eyes—black holes, lungs—green clouds,
I haul my pine coffin in a black Chevrolet.
