Member Poem

(On the Rwandan Genocide)

April wept in crimson streams,
The soil drank deep in shattered dreams.
Mothers wailed where silence grew,
The wind bore whispers no one knew.

The sun rose twice on severed lands,
Yet mercy slipped through bloodstained hands.
Neighbors turned, as echoes screamed,
Where once was life, now death convened.

The rivers ran, not blue, but red,
A thousand ghosts where bodies bled.
Each breath was choked, each name erased,
Each dawn defiled, each night displaced.

Blades conversed in twisted tongues,
A nation's heart was ripped in lungs.
No scripture spoke, no god replied,
As faith lay butchered at their side.

Smoke ascended, prayers fell,
History wrote what lips won’t tell.
A genocide, a fractured past,
Yet wounds endure, yet shadows last.

But even ashes yield to rain,
And even graves can birth again.
A nation torn, yet stitched anew,
Still bears the scars, still walks it through.

For though the ghosts still call at night,
And memories burn in candlelight,
The hands that once held blades to kill,
Now build, now heal—against their will.