Still water

In October 2010, a cholera outbreak,

brought in by UN peacekeepers, hit Haiti.

Don’t speak. Fear death by water still.

Fear attendance of moral responsibility

darker than your skin. Fear

water. Fear the mug mother used to drink

from it every Wednesday till 2010.

Yet You don’t say it. Artibonite is a period,

So suitable for pouring in rusted rescue and coins

That never get to give.

Flooding the newspaper pages with ads,

Rather than death and life, than dangerous water

Rooted in safe homes and safe dreams:

For blank pages are valuable.

So is silence. So don’t speak.

Don’t plant dangerous words all along

the dangerous riverbank.

Save the blanks to promote an appropriately lost speech:

So still that’s it is just like our water.

Don’t speak. No sounds are to be made except water.

The only voice is pinned to the left chest

Of a well-ironed shirt along with a pen:

to pour out a speech that gets washed out

Into every open eye. And you don’t have to speak

To sleep with soil as bedsheets; rustling sounds of green

Plastic paper falling into open ears automatically.

Don’t speak without a clean river. Don’t.

The only sound is pinned to the October, pinned to 2010,

Pinned to rusty-lake-like Haiti. Pinned to the pen along with

The spokesman’s empty chest underneath.

A sound without river is ink:

Scribbling down 200,000 names that’s hard to remember and see.

Names with 200,000 spines suppressed to printing ink,

and sewed silently

into the skinny shadow of the bolded headlines to be seen.

You have no word. 2010 is merely a season

That’s suitable for dying, suitable for diarrhea,

Suitable for fever, suitable for

Graving the cracks of lips onto the tombs;

Suitable to close the eyes and close the bursting thirst and desires;

For pain. For silence.

Silence.

Just a suitable season without a river.

Thick death is pouring down,

smashing the wall of temporary hospital wing thin;

the fall of 2010 is as thin as a promise.

A season not suitable for speaking.

A Wednesday not suitable for picking up bones

That are meant to be buried.

Don’t speak. They are speaking for you:

Edit the pains to be voluntary,

And confess the assistance to be self-giving.

You have an editable river, but still some are speaking:

“Our voluntary blood is cleaner than your mandatory rescuing.

&We died a collaborative death and are still dying.”

Some are still reciting ten years of bloodless and riverless life

And continue writing: years as harsh as bones.

Don’t speak. Ten years of silence is as long as

A five-minutes rally that never get published:

Five-minutes-long equally nameless rivers.

The sound at the end of the water channel: don’t speak

For we have water still.

Still trimming river without a mother

Blatantly thinking about homeland being the

Silence never safe.

Intertwined: dehydrated veins & contaminated rivers

Yet don’t speak, for no sorrowful and clean pipes

Going through homes, connecting cracked walls,

Maintaining speechless lives: silently – inevitably.

Still removing denial

Still suing with water recycled into veins and bodies.

Enclosing a historical death of mother and son

And us, like

Enclosing a collective post-modern humanity

Being buried

With still water returning to all of us to be seen.

Works Cited

"Haiti's Cholera Outbreak Tied To Nepalese U.N. Peacekeepers." NPR, 12 Aug. 2013, 4:49PM ET, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=211434286.

Moloney, Anastasia. "A Decade after U.N.-Linked Cholera Outbreak, Haitians Demand Justice." Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 22 Oct. 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-cholera-un-feature-trfn-idUSKBN2772RM.

Weinmeyer, Richard. "Pursuing Justice in Haiti's Cholera Epidemic." Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association, American Medical Association, 1 July 2016, journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/pursuing-justice-haitis-cholera-epidemic/2016-07.