Tuesday, January 16, 2018

January 16: Storytelling, Haki R. Madhubuti, "Rwanda: Where Tears Have No Power"

It is a dark night, and I am pretty weary.  When I got home this afternoon, I spent an hour-and-a-half shoveling.  By the time I was done, it was almost dark. 

Because I am so tired, I'm having some difficulty stringing together my thoughts into something coherent.  The poem I have chosen for today is an interesting hybrid of free verse and prose poem.  It's about race and violence and genocide and refugees.  In short, it's perfect for tonight in Trump America. 

It makes me think about how important it is to tell our stories, no matter how ugly or brutal they may be. Stories are a way to instruct and warn and heal.  And listening is an act of revolution.

Saint Marty is always ready to listen.

Rwanda:  Where Tears Have No Power

by:  Haki R. Madhubuti

Who has the moral high ground?

Fifteen blocks from the whitehouse
on small corners in northwest, d.c.
boys disguised as me rip each other’s hearts out
with weapons made in china. they fight for territory.

across the planet in a land where civilization was born
the boys of d.c. know nothing about their distant relatives
in Rwanda. they have never heard of the hutu or tutsi people.
their eyes draw blanks at the mention of kigali, byumba
or butare. all they know are the streets of d.c., and do not
cry at funerals anymore. numbers and frequency have a way
of making murder commonplace and not news
unless it spreads outside of our house, block, territory.

modern massacres are intraethnic. bosnia, sri lanka, burundi,
nagorno-karabakh, iraq, laos, angola, liberia, and rwanda are
small foreign names on a map made in europe. when bodies
by the tens of thousands float down a river turning the water
the color of blood, as a quarter of a million people flee barefoot
into tanzania and zaire, somehow we notice. we do not smile,
we have no more tears. we hold our thoughts. In deeply
muted silence looking south and thinking that today
nelson mandela seems much larger
than he is.

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