The Hand of Intervention

by Chloe Roth

The smell of fresh newsprint is strong as I search for you, Haiti,
search for a suitable translation of your crisis,
because your island is burning like green and red spots on the backs of my
eyelids.
But my language makes you sound dirty and barbaric.
You are "squalid slums," you are "lawless streets," you are "confusion and
anarchy,"
you are Creole shrieks of urgency, hoarse from shrieking for 200 years.


I see a white hand scoop you up like a lost, rabid puppy
and drop you naked and shivering on the courtroom floor
to be judged under the world's misshapen magnifying glass,
your image warped because you cannot afford to be airbrushed innocent.
I see the hand slam down its gavel and sentence you to another 200 years of
silence,
gagged and bound by ropes woven from poverty and unemployment.


You quaked when your elected leader was uprooted from his tainted throne,
and while the white hand picked him up and replaced him to his seat,
it placed an embargo upon your head, punishment for trembling.
And when your children tried to flee
the hand was there like a storm, blocking them at the port
and sending them back into your starving, midnight arms.
Death by ocean or death by Guantanamo Bay.


You quake again now, Haiti,
threatening to sink back into the ocean from where you came:
black, volcanic, and beautiful,
hot and lonely.
The hand pats you on the head and tells you:
You are good when you are quiet.
Do not scream too loud.