After the earthquake I wrote here, here and here about hearing my friend Magalie Boyer on the radio, being interviewed on the American Public Media show The Story. Hers was one of the respectful, loving, and deeply sorrowful voices coming out of Haiti in those terrible days, an articulate Haitian woman speaking her sadness about what had happened to her country.
This week Magalie shared a poem with me that she wrote about the earthquake, and I immediately begged her to let me share it for Poetry Friday.
Here it is.
Postmortem
by Magalie Boyer
Some things we lost in the earthquake:
The Ministry of Planification and of External Cooperation and the Ministry of Public Health
The Ministry of Finance and of the Economy and the Palais de Justice
The Primature and the DGI
The National Palace
Canado
Sainte Trinite and Sacre Coeur
The Wesleyan Church of Carrefour-feuilles
Maxo’s records, complete with his new-born picture, from Chancerelle
And Mario, who was 17 and albino
Marie-Lucie, a nursing student, Marie-Lucie and her 98 classmates
The habit of hearing harmony in the city’s cacophony
(As if the ensemble of tap-taps and 4x4s could be a choir!)
Our casual relationship with rank misery
The ability to match our tears to our grief
Jacmel’s invincibility
The mask of sufficiency
The fig leaf of society
Here is today's Poetry Friday roundup.
4 hours ago
9 comments:
What a powerful, deceptively simple, moving poem. So glad your friend gave you permission to share it with us.
Oh my Goodness. Tabatha has said it: truly powerful and moving, with so many unexpected, slight shifts that jolt you into thinking about each individual entity outside the statistics that are so difficult to take on board after a disaster. Thank you so much, Ruth, for your urging, and to Magalie for allowing you to share it with us.
Wow. Just wow.
Powerful indeed. Thank you. Please thank her, too.
Do you think she would let me put it up with a link back to your blog for the sake of attribution?
Oh Ruth, this pushes at me with some of the sorrowful words, but also seems to exemplify those words almost at the end, "the mask of sufficiency". Thank you for making sure you could share.
Thanks for sharing this. A list of devastation without end. So many powerful lines:
"our casual relationship with rank misery"
Such pain. Such big pain for the country's losses and such sharp pain for the particular losses. And the loss of "The mask of sufficiency/The fig leaf of society." Wow. That's grim.
"The fig leaf of society" -- powerful last line. Thank you for sharing this poem, Ruth. List poems appear to be so simple, but when they are well constructed, there is emotional impact as the list builds.
The mask of sufficiency
The fig leaf of society
What binds us...what keeps us apart....what a beautiful poem.
Ruth, I wrote it only last week, unexpectedly, really. Thank you very much for posting, and all who took time to comment. Magalie
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