“What I Carried Quietly”

I carried your memory quietly,
like a stone in my chest,
The kind of weight silence gives
when there’s too much left unsaid.
It’s not that I need you to come back.
I needed you to care
while you were still here,
even when you’re far.

When I spoke of pain,
you spoke of defense.
Not once did you ask
what it cost me to stay.
You guarded your pride
while I stood there bare,
hoping for kindness and empathy,
finding only cold air.

I am not begging.
I am not broken.
But I am honest.
I only ever wanted to matter to you.
Not in some dramatic way,
Just in the quiet way people cherish
what they don’t want to lose,
the memory they once shared.

And now, I see the shift.
I experience the distance.
I feel the absence
where warmth used to be.
He fills the space I once held.
I have become a shadow
where I once was light.

You are whole now, it seems.
Complete.
Satisfied.
And I, forgettable.
A name that no longer stirs
anything in you.

But I remember.
And I release.
Not in bitterness.
Mostly for myself.
And for a new start.

So this is not a plea,
Just a letting go.
Of waiting.
Of wondering.
Of longing.
Of wishing.

I wish you peace.
I wish me peace, too.
I wish you rest.
I wish me rest, too.

In 2020, the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C. invited me to do a presentation on the history of the Haitian Flag.🇭🇹

Happy Haitian Flag Day!

“Go Tell the World: Africa and Haiti’s enduring Gifts to the (Western) World”

A pioneer from Haiti founded the great city of Chicago: Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable. Now, the first elected U.S. Pope in history is also from Chicago: Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”). DuSable and Pope Leo XIV—the most powerful person of the Roman Catholic expression of the Christian faith—have Haitian roots 🇭🇹 and of African ancestry.

Through Haiti, Africa has poured forth its gifts 🎁 upon the Western world—echoes of resilience, rhythm, revolution, heroic leadership, human freedom—including:

1. The first Black Governor: Toussaint Louverture
2. The first Black President: Jean-Jacques Dessalines
3. The first Black Emperor: Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Jacques I)
4. The first Black King: Henry Christophe
5. The first Black woman President: Ertha Pascal-Trouillot
6. The only country in the world that had a successful slave revolution and the first independent country in the Western world that abolished slavery.

Haiti may be a small nation currently facing political turmoil and humanitarian crises—what the great African American poet Langston Hughes once called paradoxically a ‘troubled island’—yet it remains a profoundly influential country with a complex and impactful social and political history in the global human story.