Will you write a poem about Haiti?

I think likely not.

Why? What of the children, and the dead,
the poverty which has ceded way to something worse.

Yes, what of it?

Rouse yourself to meet it, that’s what.
Find what minor gift you have, find your language.

I don’t have a language for such things.
That is what makes horror horror.
It is beyond us until we are staring it down,
and even then it is beyond us. We register it
only in fragments so that we can endure.

Then what purpose do you have to us?

To acknowledge through time that somewhere in this world
there was devastation and I went about my life, and you
yours, and the Haitians theirs, albeit their lives altered.
And not because of callousness, but because
such terror is private, existing only in the languages
of our bodies that bear witness. Languages
we cannot translate or decipher; that somehow
guide us. What can we call space when
it is insurmountable?

Horror, I suppose. Or love. You should still try. You can come close.

And I am trying. But already I have lost the horror
because it is transfigured. And when
someone reads this many years from now, this
evidence serves to defeat time. He will know my
heart, its frailty and cowardice and limitations.
Horror replaced with art. Distance failing, always
failing, to render that which cannot be rendered.