Rwanda to Goma, 1994
It was apocalyptic beyond imagination,
the scale of it. . . .
~ Photographer David Turnley
The armed at the church
doors gave no sanctuary.
Sleep beggared in the room
where death claimed its own
among lost hands and arms
bare legs and unshod feet.
The cuts of the machetes
twenty years ago go deeper,
stilled, than memory holds.
Look again at the pictures.
Ask are there differences
among faces of fear. Search
— will you? — the five
hundred thousand, breathless,
the million on the side
of a mountain of volcanic rock.
What we can imagine is no aberration.
© 2014 Maureen E. Doallas
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
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1 comment:
This poem looks the horror of 20 years ago straight in the face, and honors it with your images. Thank you. (I'm late reading it because George had to go to ER Tuesday for extreme chest pain; no heart attack, thankfully, and he's now home with new meds.)
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