How my heart cringes on this mountain carcass – mounded bones stripped bare. Flayed flanks decay into ceaseless city striving. Betrayed and battered, you sprawl exposed, miserable, dull with hunger. But I sense something here, yearning at the fringes. Something broods at the frayed edges of this wasteland. Something determined, stubborn, more powerful and pervasive…Read more Painting A Prayer for Haiti (& a poem)
hope
Scars That Tell of the Good Life
With the kind of radiance that hints at secret knowledge of something very deep and very good, Noyo eagerly describes the privilege he feels in serving his native country, Haiti, as a Young Life staff-worker. “Just because something is easy,” he explains, “doesn’t mean it is the best. If you do something easy, it doesn’t…Read more Scars That Tell of the Good Life
A Beautiful Girl in Haiti
Deep in the trenches of poverty and strife, a beautiful girl wearing a white head-band picks her way through garbage and crumbling cement and passes through the gates of Good Shepherd School. In Cite Soleil, the poorest slum of the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, she aspires to something more than she inherited at…Read more A Beautiful Girl in Haiti
Wherever I am on this Planet
Through all the glitter, tedium, and crush of this life... I’ve seen it in rural Vietnam in the shining eyes of parents who care for eight orphaned boys… ...in the joyful upturned faces of the persecuted church of Nepal, who gather without fear… ...in those who awoke in the desperate poverty of Mathare Valley, the second largest…Read more Wherever I am on this Planet
Port au Prince Haiti at a Glance
Port au Prince is the hustling, bustling, overflowing city-that-never-stops capital of Haiti. It is said that the streets are the living room of Port au Prince. From the brightly colored, stacked structures on the hillsides of the upscale Petionville suburb to the densely-packed, narrow crumbling streets of the City Soleil slum, it is an endless…Read more Port au Prince Haiti at a Glance
A Rooftop Crack in Haiti
On Monday, dawn crept over me on a rooftop in Haiti. Just below, massive trucks lumbered over narrow rocky streets, lugging water to and from a water purification facility. Roosters crowed and dogs barked. People walked, sang, laughed, and chattered in every nook and cranny in the streets, balconies and rooftops all around. Palm fronds…Read more A Rooftop Crack in Haiti
Hope
A bird sings in deep December; its persistent serenade coaxes morning into dark. What memories of summer nectar fill its trilling head? What longing for lilting spring breeze floods its swelling chest? Here, where heavy, settling layers weight our hearts in sleep, a singular bird refuses to notice, to succumb. It rises before dawn and…Read more Hope
See You – Progression of a Piece
Before dawn, in the crisp cold air of an old house still thinking about firing up the furnace, I creep past sleeping lumps of my children and up the stairs. My friend and I smile greetings, unwilling to disturb with unnecessary words a quiet that feels somehow reverent. Large cups of coffee cradled in…Read more See You – Progression of a Piece
Painting a Place Beyond
I discovered this week that writing about the American/Vietnam War stirred up a torrent of scary emotions. I often “think” in feelings, not words or even images, but currents of emotional energy. After I wrote certain phrases, they tossed around in my head like a bare branch in the wind. Then, as I reflected further,…Read more Painting a Place Beyond
Held
I am battered, a bereft leaf loosed in murky mayhem, kicked up by frenzied heels Of moon and wind. No mooring remains in this, last corkscrew hour before dawn. I am a burnished shadow, a swirling swan song to inky nihility. Falling. Suddenly! Madness slivered, snagged in the hem of earth’s evergreen garment, quivering on the…Read more Held
Colleen Briggs Images & Writing 