Jerrice J Baptiste

In Your Soul Hafiz

“Admit something: everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’”
Hafiz (1320-1389)
 
In your soul Hafiz there must have been a passionate lover of plumped purple figs, red ruby seeds of pomegranate, wine on lips welcoming a mauve dusk alone. You must have cried out of deep sorrow and known loss not just of the departed but of someone alive beneath the sun, where you could see her stroll hand in hand with another by a river. Her cheek brushed with a pink rose not one you offered; her smile beamed not by your romantic verses. You let her be, turned to the divine, and your soul sang.
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Spring Hike
 
She travels light. A miniature emerald-coloured knapsack on her back holds a Ziplock bag of granola with red dried raspberries, sunflower seeds, and shaved almonds to eat when she reaches the mountaintop. A sixteen-ounce bottle of ice mint tea to sip, hanging on the pouch of the knapsack as she hikes. Scented lavender towelettes to wipe her armpits. A white t-shirt with three quarter sleeves to change into when the sweat has dripped down her spine to her coccyx bone. She travels light, smiling at birdsongs filtering through her eardrums, caressing her mind. Absorbing colours of yellow forsythia in early spring, goldenrods, daisies and Queen Ann’s lace growing on the side of the mountain. Buries her nose in purple lilac bushes in early June, she inhales their scent as their branches sway. She babbles with the brook as her eyes follow its path down the mountainside, singing its melody. She mimics the wings of the eagle, zig-zagging her arms in flight. A butterfly kissing fuchsia flower to flower. A bee suckling the nectar centre’s breast of a sunflower. She’s glowing sunlight in midst of a summer’s poem. 
 
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Savour
 
It has been pouring for three days. Purple orchids, and pink hibiscus are gone with the island. Gone with harsh winds that tremble lips, skull and heart.  Where to take refuge?  I hear the news of flooding from uncle. Row boats needed to traverse from street to street. In my safe home in the US, I peel an orange in circular motion, zest tickle nostrils and I savor each segment as if it were my last. I can’t stop thinking of the famine in my country, and the sea that rises, the erosion of land, the trees sliding inches forward towards the final turquoise crystal of life. My abundance is a joy and a guilt. Red blood oranges becoming rare, disappearing in the daylight with rain drops on tin roofs, makeshift homes and cobalt blue tent slums blown by harsh winds. 
 
My abundance is a joy and a guilt. The last time I visited the island, the disaster was an earthquake where bodies were buried under rubble. Partial living rooms and kitchens had collapsed. I could picture the neighbours sitting for their last meals of malanga, plantains, okra with mushroom, silky black rice perhaps a fried red snapper in creole sauce.  A stiff leg or and an arm jolted my heart under rubble as uncle and I walked the neighborhood looking for friends and peeking inside partial houses, the way you look inside a magenta doll house where the purple paisley couch still stands in the corner. Except, this wasn’t a play. One grey cloud hung over the city. It was a place of oat and mahogany-coloured coffins and funerals. One grey cloud hangs now with the hurricane. Uncle tells me, “Hurricanes will wash away the island. We can’t take any more.” I whisper a prayer and a blessing. I pick up another orange, peel it in circular motion & savour each segment.
 
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When The Ruler Strikes
 
My spine elongates when she walks down the aisle with her wooden ruler in hand. The red chambers of my heart jolt when her shadow roams from the back of the third-grade classroom to arrive at the front.  Her lemon scent from the bottle of Jean-Naté permeates the air.  Hermance’s scent approaches my desk that squeaks. I quickly switch from writing with my left hand to writing with my right hand.  Her wooden yellow ruler smacks my hands. “You think I didn’t see you switch hands? Huh?” My shame for being caught lowers my gaze.  My heart jumps like a race horse over hurdles. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, Jean Baptiste.”  I pick up my head to see Hermance’s face protruding from her black and white veil.  Her light caramel-coloured skin seems to age each day without any compassion. Did she ever cry? Did she ever know loss, fear, suffering?

Near her eyes are crows’ feet resembling small pleats on my pink school uniform. Hermance strolls the aisles with pride that her skin color is better than my mocha skin tone. The school girls with light skin were not hit on their hands. Each night, I prayed for the awful school building to be torched by someone who carried the viridian green rage in their arthritic fingers. 
 
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Black Summer Peach
 
I had fallen far from the peach tree. Washed by rain drops on a bed of green fervent summer leaves, carried by the wild wind. My stem and pit don’t resemble other peaches. They remain un-plucked by fingers; small toes have pointed unable to reach my twin.  You and I are not from the same branch, or the same family of flesh and seeds. I wait for the tumbling of your round body and you do not fall to join me in the grass. The soil from which we grew has given you all the pigmentation, and I pale and fuzzy, rinsed again by the rain, soak and shiver with morning dew drops. My complaint has only reached you from where you are, up high in the tree with the tenderness of a breeze.  Maybe, I will become the first black peach when the mud coats my uneven skin. Yours will glisten in the sun on a curved branch hanging over the ripples of the creek. The tourists sailing will capture your perfect circumference, peach colour and texture in their photographs. I would’ve been too far from the tree that birth us to be noticed. They will rave “Oh how beautiful, the shimmer of this perfect peach in sunlight.” Then, you will be placed in a pearl frame on a windowsill.  I would’ve been coated in dry mud and only rain boots crushing my body will free my feathered soul. At the sound of tourists dragging their feet, my segments will smear the ground of the orchard. Maybe, I will be noticed when one lifts up their foot to look in the grooves, asking, “What’s that?”           
 
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Jerrice J Baptiste is an artist, poet, author of nine books. Her most recent book titled, Coral in The Diaspora, was published by Abode Press (August 2024). She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize by Jerry Jazz Musician 2024 & Abode Press 2025, and as Best of The Net in 2022 by Blue Stem. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Mantis, One Art: Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Write Launch, The Banyan Review, Ecotheo Review, The Yale Review, The Lake, Artemis Journal and hundreds of others. She facilitates poetry as a returning teaching artist at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. Her poems & collaborative songwriting are featured on the Grammy nominated album-Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti.