THE BARE BRUTALITY

(Written at the Genocide Centre in Kigali)
There is a bitter taste in my mouth
Sitting here
Here, where spirits of innocent Tutsi’s fight back tears of their loss
Here, where their few leftovers go and come
Like struck sheep
Still knocked out by degrading shocks
Even after years are nearing their thirty steps
Only my fingers obey my thoughts
My mouth refuses to open

II
What is this?
Hands of brothers acting on voices of sisters
To murder with clubs and machetes and guns and ropes and fire
As pious rivers were forced to soil themselves by swallowing the innocent?
What brutal forces forced grown men
To throw children like unwanted fruits
Against walls to be horribly deceased?
What deadly seeds grew that anger
Which made sane men hunger for blood of their neighbours?
Which deadly waters served an unquenched thirst
To a point where men took the dignities of women in eyes of carers and
Planted AIDS to germinate bitterness and disgust?
What horrid pills drugged consciences into deep sleep
To create a mess that makes many weep
Just so some egos could dust their needs?

III
I am torn
Torn in pity
Torn in annoyance
Torn in minds oh so vulnerable
Torn in hurts
Torn in pain
Torn in manipulations oh so insane
Torn in bitterness
Torn in shame
Torn in pieces of climbing shocks
Torn in tears
Torn in fears
Torn by years oh so bonkers!
Weeping for my Africa slashed and butchered
Raped and gunned
Spit on and burnt
Slapped and hanged
My Africa nurtured as brutes and made to work
To dent a history
A history of love!
My Africa whose breath still works even through the torment!

IV
I pray for a border to stop the bother
And a sanity to cancel insanity
I pray for happiness to burn the pain
And a peace refreshner to kill the rage
I pray for a haunting to chase farmers
Of cruelty of us against our ours
I pray for immunization of this hellish genocide
For love to thrive in place of hate
I pray for baits knotted by mischiefs
To turn around to bite hands of their masters
I pray for us to guide our ours
And kill our hunters so known as sires

V
Never again must this rope stifle us into shedding our greens!
Never again must those machetes
Butcher our fathers and pierce hearts of our brothers!
Never again should we be compelled
Like impoverished merchants
To buy bullets for our firing!
Never again!
Never ever again must we turn penises to rape our women and unright their fate
Never ever again must that dark drown our blackness with its beauty and dignity
Tribe never defined but refined and must so sit to better us in dynamisms
This scar will forever be but must actually remind us
To be soldier ants
Guarding our safety through brotherhood and sisterhood and motherhood and fatherhood
Long live Rwanda!
Long live the continent!
Long live the Africa who has seen and felt it all!
Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia © March 7, 2019