new poem: pray

It's December 24th. My apartment smells like clementines and balsam fir. My presents are wrapped - absurdly. I'm thinking of you. Have you successfully avoided the mall? Are you scrambling to stuff stockings and turkeys? Tofurkeys? Studying a Chinese take-out menu? Greeting family in your best and warmest clothes? Still in flannel pajamas, posting love notes on FaceBook?

I just wanted to take a minute to thank the hearts, hands and mouths that have remembered Haiti in 2010. The one-year anniversary of a cataclysmic January 12 earthquake is fast-approaching. There's so much work to be done! It's overwhelming but it's possible. Happy New Year, Dreamers and Movers. As we celebrate life and love, may we lift life and love. May we imagine bravely and in good company. May we practice compassion and act accordingly. Here's a poem for the journey:

PRAY
Pray for the people of Haiti.

Pray for ruined bellies, loose minds, rasping voices.

Pray for cracked hearts that dance inside choleric bodies. 

Pray for the woman who cooks with amputated arm. 

Pray for the ground stood upon, slept upon, protested upon.

Pray for the ground no longer trusted to stay still.
Pray for the poets who salvage pens from uncleared rubble.
Pray for the lwa to pardon the makeshift states of our altars.
Pray for the man who sings his fist into lifting palm.

Pray for the lovers whose fugitive moans rise above the unabated stench of death.

Pray for the dead who shiver beside us.
Pray for the children but first
teach them to play.

© 2010 by Lenelle Moïse