Comets, 1942 - Poem

African American Review, Fall, 2002

Comets, 1942.

Myronn Hardy


He watches women pass into the church
  their feet shedding daylight. They carry
bibles in loose fingers the thin-skinned
pages exhumed from death.

He places his basket of avocados on the dirt ground.
A small girl stops in front of him she'd seen him before
  in a grove of fog where Jesus waited
for the world to fall apart. She presses into an avocado
leaving fingerprints in its green ripeness.

There is a square in front of him where dormant
canons aim toward the empty market tsy mitsahatra
miteny ny maty.

He touches his tongue the French he was
forced to learn in school after holding the bloody
hand of his headless father.

The church is white paper blowing to Jerusalem.
The earth is smoke gathering inside his palm.
He is shedding his skin in a pile leaving it beside
the women who will never forget that year those comets.

Myronn Hardy is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. His first collection of poems, Approaching the Center, was published by New Issues Press in 2001.