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.

This poem won First Place in the Poems of Solidarity for Haiti Contest.

• An Interview with M. Ayodele Heath
  by Collin Kelley
  Atlanta, Georgia

Please also see:

• Poems of Solidarity for Haiti
  PDF of Collection of Poems
  Available for Free Download
  
  
• Ayiti
  by April 'AP' Smith
  Decatur Georgia
  
  
• Wings Soaked in Molasses
  by Darnell Fine
  
  
• Haiti, after Pat Robertson
  by Karen Garrbrant
  
  
• Everybody Running, Saying Jesus
  by Jenny D'Angelo
  Santa Cruz, California
  
  
• Tomorrow's Toussaints
  by Kalamu ya Salaam
  Atlanta, Georgia