Tomorrow is already gone and yesterday,well, yesterday will wear its own green coat.The country that never was and never will beis now the Pearl of the Antilles.Only the trivial should be put under seriousconsideration. Everything else is delight.Tomorrow was an insatiable animal, mouthagape, and we are only what we are: time clocks.After Tuesday, Monday is a lonely ocean.And the shore is in the margins, friends.Not everyone will be queer or Black tomorrow,but everything else will be seamed in the samepatterns, mark my word. Only the seriouswill be proven right, but it was too late, we know.Tomorrow sat at yesterday’s door and gossiped.All night, the voices at the cemetery were silentwords written in a foreign calligraphy, withmeaning we perceived with bat ears and dog nose.There was a reason for all this that we acceptedwas never worthy of time and place.
On the Day After the Bois Caïman Ceremony, César Vallejo Spoke
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“On the Day After the Bois Caïman Ceremony, César Vallejo Spoke” from KONBIT: by Sony Ton-Aime.
Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press on February 19, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by Sony Ton-Aime.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
John Beale
Sony Ton-Aime is a poet, essayist, and translator. His works include a poetry collection, Konbit (Carnegie Mellon Univeristy Press, 2026), and a Haitian Creole translation of Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour’s Story. He co-authored the Haitian Creole course on Duolingo, and his work has appeared in Artful Dodge, Cream City Review, Idaho Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Cleveland Review of Books, and Consequence Forum, among others. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he currently works as the executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.
Konbit is a Haitian Creole word, a way of living, for which there is no direct translation in the English language. It captures the communal life in Haiti and is used for every event where neighbors are called upon to help each other. These poems revolve around the Bois-Caïman ceremony (the first konbit) when enslaved people in Saint-Domingue vowed to fight for their independence. The ceremony is both real and a stand-in for climate change. Like our society, everything around enslaved people in Saint-Domingue was created to uphold the status quo. Imagining an alternative would have been seen as futile. Yet, they did. This collection is an attempt to do the same, to imagine a future beyond colonialism, imperialism, and climate catastrophe. With poems influenced by and in conversation with Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, Shara McCallum, and Adrian Matejka, Sony Ton-Aime aims to provide a new language to articulate our common past, present, and future.
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