What is Needed
by JOSEPH G. RAMSEY

            Campside (based on true events)

1.
 In Haiti
 there is money to build
 walls
             not to house
 the poor
 but to block them
 from view;
 to lay brick
 high and thick,
 not to protect
             the homeless
             from the elements,
 but to protect
 the rich man’s twenty-acre
 estate
 from the sewage that flows
                                     downhill
                                           from the camp
                                                 when it rains.

And so now
when it rains
A human stew
Bubbles backs from the base of the wall
into the camp—
deep enough to drown in
A gathering cesspool
for mosquitos
to breed
and cholera
to bloom.

2.
The construction project
Gives at least
a few men
—from another camp across town—
work:
hard, back-breaking work
for a few weeks
At almost three times the minimum wage
Of a dollar a day.

The wall at least
gives
the mosquitos
a home.

These fiends thrive,
Lay their eggs in the stagnant water
Feeding by night
on what flesh they can puncture.

Each little blood-sucker’s life
is short.
They live for only a few weeks
Before they drop somewhere
Dead
In some unmarked speck grave—that is
if they aren’t caught first
Between the finger and the thumb–
They burst like tiny rotten berries.

Yes, any single
mosquito can be easily dealt with.
Once you know where exactly its buzz
Comes from.
Splat.
But in their uncountable numbers,
an invisible, everywhere swarm
They appear utterly
unvanquishable.
You go mad at night
just swatting the sound of them .
Praying through razed blisters
for someone
to drain this godforsaken swamp
of a world.

3.
Across the street, Food for the Poor (that’s their name)
Tells a delegation from the camp (they’re next door neighbors)
that they cannot help them;
That this is a not a distribution center;
That FFP’s funds go elsewhere
And that, besides, they wouldn’t want to start trouble by
giving food (or mosquito netting)
to people
Just like that,
Without, you know, going through all the proper channels.
Without armed guards present
to keep order
and paid clerks on hand
to track everything on official charts and checklists:
how many grains of how much rice went to whom and to where and what color it was, and who said please and who thank you (and who did not).
 I mean, if distributing food to the poor was as easy as, you know, just
Givingfoodtopoorpeoplewhosaytheyarehungry
andwhohavetheribsandcollarbonestoproveit
 then, well,
You wouldn’t even need professional organizations like
Food for the Poor
in the first place,
would you?

4.
A world away
Far beyond even the locked gates of Charity
Elsewhere
Where “History” is made
A UN official
gets promoted
to stand behind a podium and
speak of “A risk of a pandemic” and
“A surge in infant mortality.”
Earnest euphemism
Rolls off that juicy pink tongue;
(The fluent official gargles water
Before coming on stage
with another bottle of Aquafina at the podium
Just in case
the throat suddenly dries up;
It can get awfully hot up there,
Under all those bright lights,
With all the world watching.)

5.
Meanwhile
In the dark
cholera stretches it limbs across prison floors
From steel barred windows to crack-webbed walls
Where profane protests against the state
are smeared in feces
and blood.

Some walls still won’t fall.
As others go up.

And more are planned.

*

Tons upon tons of construction materials
Sit piled at camp-side:
Metal beams like the stacked legs of starved giants,
Head-high mounds of sand and crushed granite, rubble
Fresh-shoveled and trucked
from the wreckage of Port-au-Prince.
(There’s a fortune being made in the sale of rubble.)

Monster machines sit idle. Watched over by armed guards.
And a handful of hired workers stand and smoke, idle too,
waiting to break ground, at the boss’s order.
Their muscles itch for work.

There are building materials here
 for a hundred homes, at least.

Only,
Not.

The squatters are to be
 Evicted
 from their road-side camp
 By the rightful land owner
 With the official stamp.

He wants to build a factory
He needs to build a factory
 –there is money for a factory–
obligations to meet
words to keep
(The owners, too, imprisoned, by what they must build
Though their jail-cells are air-conditioned,
And fur coats keep off the chill.)

There’s a signed contract with a foreign company
to produce: baseballs
to be exported and sold to Sporting Goods stores
who will sell them at a mark-up
to the parents of little American boys and girls
who have fields to play in
and who can afford to lose things
in streams and under fences
and buy new ones.

6.
Campside
Hundreds of people contemplate
Scraping up the will
to struggle together, to keep their grip
on a cracked plot of ground that they never asked for
In the first place;
That was forced upon them:
A sun-baked tarp town
where they have been confined for more than a year now,
without schools or sanitation,
While the rulers make plans
That do not include them
Except as sources of
excrement
To be sealed off
Or else
as cheap labor
to be mixed
with the bricks
that wall people
in
and people
out.

*
The bulldozers rumble
 The manager shouts
 “If there’s no trouble, if you all move out,
 Some of you may get the chance to sew baseballs.
 You like baseballs, don’t you?”
 The new boss promises two dollars a day.

A few will be hired—the rest flushed
away.

7.
 Will the refuse of this system pick this city
 of sheets and boiling shade
 Of ghosts and newborns and grandparents
 and toys
 But no safe place to play and
Of grime and sand
and whispered songs
And blanched rebel memories
 To make their stand?

The stagnant waste water by the wall
 rises.
 Do they think they can?

Or will the machetes and machine guns
 scatter them in the night
 (As they have done before)
 Leaving them in the ditch
 Dreaming of clean streams,
 a plot of land,
 And a world
 That’s been flushed
 of walls
 and the
 rich?

8.
 A rash spreads across the old woman’s legs
 What can she do?
 But bang her two pots together at half past noon
 with the others,
 (a daily demonstration)
 that, and be ready to place her body between her grand-child
 and the bulldozer, when they come:

She’s lost her shop, and her sewing machine.
 Used to sew clothes for people in the city,
 To patch the garments of those who could not afford to buy new.
 (She had been one of the luckier few.)

There is plenty here that needs stitching.
 By hand, she does what she can do.
 sews rags into a quilt,
 keeps a sole
 on a shoe.

(Plenty that needs tearing down, here, too.)

*
 A baby lies asleep on the bed,
 a mosquito net dome, laid over his head.
 Those elsewhere who can afford it use mesh like this
 to protect their finger sandwiches from the flies,
 when they sit out with guests in summer time.

*
 In an alley of the cramped camp
 The braids of a child
 Flap in the wind
 As she chases a red rubber ball downhill
 Between tents
 Trying catch it
 Catch
 it
 Before it rolls into
 the muck.

*
 Do you want to know
 What happens next?
 Do you?
 Or shall we just let this one go, too?
 Let it go
 Let it go
 How much of this world are we willing to just
 Let go?
 How much humanity
 Will we just let go
 Let fall
away
 Like some ball
 slipping through
 A child’s open palm?

Or a kite forever swallowed by the sky?

*
Fresh watered flowers
and incense torches
line the owners’ oblivious porches,
keeping off the bugs
masking some distant stench.

And a young girl has drowned in a rain-swollen trench.

*
There is money in Haiti
To build with; it pours in;
the rich hire poor people with it
erect walls with it
so they don’t have to see
the sludge
That soils their green gardens.

And this too:
 so the sorrow-sick souls gathered now
 by the edge of the camp-side mire
 still gripping pots and pans
 unearthing and wiping clear the braided face of the child
Can’t see them,
the rich,
sitting there in their place
out in the sun, doing what they do,
 Enjoying the open air:
 So well-dressed,
 carefree
 And so few.

*

More than a million still homeless
 in Haiti.
 It’s not for lack of brick or steel
 nor engineers
 Nor hands to build with.
 Not for a lack of land.
 Not for a lack of money.
 Not for lack of a Master Plan.
 *

What is it, I ask you,
 that is lacking here?

What is it,
 I ask,
 that is needed?

*

Joseph G. Ramsey is a teacher, writer, scholar, and activist who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.  He co-edits Cultural Logic: an Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, www.clogic.eserver.org, with a special issue on “Culture and Crisis” due out in June 2011.  Joe is also a participant in the Kasama Project, www.kasamaproject.org, and can be reached at jgramsey@gmail.com.  Selections of his writings are available at www.ramseythewriter.wordpress.com.