Poetry

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By

Eaton Jackson

Your Flag

I now call it your flag, ‘cause it’s not mine

it has stood silent all these years of me being hung high

public whopping for being this maligned hue

your flag has said nothing

merely fluttering in the breeze silent

on this hot humid day when anger wants to do something about anger

when hate also wants to do something about hate

observing all my injustice this other deity in the sky

this colorless one that you are so good-christian about

how I refuse to show respect for the flag and as a consequence

the justifiable reasons to put the noose around my neck

your flag you got it stuck right beside your rocking chair

on the porch of your homestead, your shotgun leaning against it

watching for me, who like a deer has to cross

the footpath parallel to your white picket fence

and your flag like a malicious child tells you that I blinked my eye

that I twitched my eyelids, that one of my fingers kept tapping against my

thigh with impatience for the one minute’s silence

that I was itching to sit and hate you with saber-like stares,

the fact which you said isn’t a fact

that my papa came back from overseas fighting for this flag

that I came back from fighting overseas too

no purple heart veteran but

to still be kicked in the butt for being an upper case N

or a lower case n

and your flag continues whispering in your ear

that my arthritic fingers tapping impatiently

is dangerous.

5 Cent Cookies

The barter is made by women stooping in the dust bowl

butter and salt poured is added to the mix.

Slender, vein-riddled hands like automated arms

stir the mud into a barter that can be wiped from

baking bowl with a finger,

and the finger sucked like kids when

their moms are baking.

The barter is now a thick slurry overarching

for more space to spread its dirt-cookie self.

But the women shan’t have none of this,

levees of more dust is mounted around diverting

any thought of a rivulet of sewage encroaching.

Spoon full drops in one cookie-mold then the next then the next.

Cite’ Soleil’s sun is low-tech oven.

Crispy crust. The kid’s faces

an expression of any chocolate-chipped-cookies eating kid’s.

If poverty is high crime

5 cent-cookies-eating Haitians kids are absolved of this crime.

The women when the kids are hungry.

Mothers when kids are hungry.

The small island nation of Haiti relies heavily on food imports, but with prices soaring, some Haitians are resorting to eating mud.

The cookies – made of dirt, butter and salt – hold little nutritional value, but manage to keep Haiti’s poor alive.

Eaton Jackson

My name is Eaton Jackson and I am a Jamaican, aspiring writer, living in the United States for the past four years. I have been writing from my teenage years. Over the years I have been published in various Jamaican publications. I have also been published in a few USA publications (Shot Glass, NewsVerse, Creative Unleashed, River Poets Journal). Despite the sense sometimes of a despairing sense of anonymity, writing on a blank piece of paper remains an instinctive reaction. So, the dream persists – to one day become a successful, published writer.