Everybody Running, Saying Jesus

by Jenny D'Angelo
Santa Cruz, California

The walls coming together and going backwards, in and out.
The furniture moving, mother screaming.

Everywhere people covered in blood, limbs in the street.
In between the bodies, the children cry.

The second night and the third night you do not sleep.
You are scared people will come and do something bad.

You don’t have anything but spaghetti and the clothes on your back.
You don’t know what your future will be.

Every day you go and get all the ice and water you can carry.
You take it to people who have nothing.

Life is very hard, but you are strong.
The orphans are singing and praying for the people around them.

There is too much work to be done.
Today you have to save lives.

Using a 10-foot plastic pipe, you pass packets of water
and energy bars threaded on a wire to a man under the rubble.

You don’t have time to cry right now.
Tomorrow you cry.

This poem won an Honorable Mention in the Poems of Solidarity for Haiti Contest.

Please also see:

• Poems of Solidarity for Haiti
  PDF of Collection of Poems
  Available for Free Download
  
  
• Sharecropper's Pantoum
  by M. Ayodele Heath
  Atlanta, Georgia
  
  
• Ayiti
  by April 'AP' Smith
  Decatur Georgia
  
  
• Wings Soaked in Molasses
  by Darnell Fine
  Atlanta, Georgia
  
  
• Haiti, after Pat Robertson
  by Karen Garrbrant
  Atlanta, Georgia
  
  
• Tomorrow's Toussaints
  by Kalamu ya Salaam
  Atlanta, Georgia