The Madonna of Port au Prince

You who look like Alice

Your eyes red with shattered plaster and weeping

Your full lips bruised with dirt

Your hairpiece of locks slipping back like a cowl

The powder dusting your oval cheeks is grey concrete —

If the rest of you was not buried under rocks of blasted wall

And the figure in the foreground was not blood splattered

And someone’s leg was not trapped behind you,

You could have been a pretty girl

With sand on your bare arms

Writing your name on a shell

On some beach off Les Cayes—

You who look like Alice

Another lost girl I used to know,

Not an ikon’s model

On a chapel wall in Jacmel

But a strange Madonna anyhow

Flat on the scattered masonry

Sans enfant, or enfant gone from your hands

To the devouring earth —

The ikon herself

Impassive Erzulie, gazing through your Carib face

From a palette of pixels

Framing now before me.

(c) John Robert Lee
(c) Photo by Daniel Morel/Photomorel of Haiti. One of the first news photographs to appear after the January 12th 2010 Haiti earthquake.