Jean d’Amérique: Blood in my Gullet

Translated by Aidan Rooney

I take off my skin and serve some blood to my town,
raise my white flag and let life drift a little down.
From war-torn skies and from my land’s salt flats
I draw sustenance and desire. Despair tracks me down.
Thus cut off from the sun, all I have left is a vacant lot.
Each kid receives a page ripped from a dirty life;
no minimum age here for taking up the gun.
Don’t be appalled that a boy pays his hood tribute in bullets.
I am a bit too stuck between a hammer and an anvil,
Portail Léogane’s wreck of a dream, Port-au-Prince etched on my skin,
my pen bent on recognising lives shook to the brink of empty,
the city’s edges crumbling on a twelfth of January.
No one seems too wont to lean in to lives sunk by lack of light,
solidarity stifled, leaving us the same old song
only those who look alike should gather to sing.

I sing my town to the sound of the bullets.
My voice wants to sketch my life but there’s just blood in my gullet.
All there is is blood in my gullet, nothing but blood in my gullet.

Some bicentenary. Rock-a-bye dreams of an urban child,
a cigarette on his lips to mark the man-child life,
the blood on the hands a sort of signature to the crime.
Me, I draw to each scream its cross-hatched sign of hope.
I have ice, like Weezy, coursing through my veins,
need to feel the sun shine on my slight frame,
fed up glimpsing love from the inside out.
A kid strokes his revolver and it breaks my heart;
after the shootouts the days are dark, the ghetto keens.
Buy me a bouquet of joy so I can pay my debt to the tears.
O for my city’s knit tumble of rubble and despair,
this ode to my city, that it find itself somewhere
between the lights and the shadows.

I sing my town to the sound of the bullets.
My voice wants to sketch my life but there’s just blood in my gullet.
All there is is blood in my gullet.

~~~~

Author of four poetry collections, three plays and a novel, Jean d’Amérique (born Jean Civilus, 1994, Côte-de-Fer, Haïti) is a writer whose voice sounds an urgent appeal to the francophone world. Brutality and beauty coincide in his work just as frequently as desire and despair, idealism and realism, thanks and no thanks. Above all, Jean d’Amérique’s work describes the destruction of his native country and its people. Recently, the writer has returned to performance, his first gateway into literature, with rap songs that stick in the craw. Du Sang dans ma Bouche, a poignant ode to Port-au-Prince, sings that admix of love and suffering that is Jean d’Amérique’s signature. 

Aidan Rooney (b. 1965, Monaghan, Ireland) is the author of Go There (Madhat Press, 2020), his third collection of poetry. Excerpts from Cécé (Archipelago Books, 2025) – his translation of Emmelie Prophète’s novel, Les Villages de Dieu(Mémoire d’Encrier, Montréal, 2020) –  can be read at Agni and Asymptote. 

Poem copyright 2025 Jean d’Amérique

Translation copyright 2025 Aidan Rooney