On the 16th of October, 1978,
In a shanty-house in Flowertown,
The community of despair beneath Death-Door Hill
Next to the sugar factories of HASCO
Down below the cane-white mansions of Port-au-Prince,
A miracle happened when Father Leon died.
The rose laurels swept him away in the hand of God
Beyond the reach of Gendarmes or Tontons-macoute.
All that was left was his walking-stick,
His rocking-chair, and his old shoes,
White with cane-dust in front of the chair.
Everything else was flowers, sweet petals of rose.
The people here, they say the roses turned his bones
Into branches, and his shiny skin, so marvelously wrinkled
From smiling eighty years against the Haitian sun,
Became all the pink pale flowers reaching out
Through the sugar haze to the sun;
Sweetening the air beyond the pig-wallow
And the wildflower plot
Where all the dogs had died, and nobody would build a house.
The people here say that the sun wept at his passing
And drowned all the fields and the shanty-tenements
In light the colour of old bones.