Poem

“If” for the Group of Eminent Persons advising CARICOM on Haiti

Adapted from Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

Or stand in your Truth when all about you are lying

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream of a new Haiti, free, sovereign, and prosperous,

Her people living with the dignity they deserve,

And reject the nightmare wrought by colonial powers;

If you can draw on the idealism of your youth

Which longed for justice to right the wrongs

And not make approval from empire your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave over two years of your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools,

If you can make one heap of all your winnings in Haiti

And stand on it to reach for victory,

But fall and lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with Haitian actors and remain impartial,

Or walk with Presidents and Prime Ministers, and not lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of the beauty, nobility, and pain of the Haitian people,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And - which is more – History will crown you among the great Caribbean Leaders, my friends!

Myrtha Désulmé