Divisions decided by some external hand,
granted galeforce destruction by brutal demand.
Morality absconded, humanity’s cruel abandon
for the fulfillment of some ideological cannon.
“The final solution” only finalizes the demise of the preacher,
yet why does history recycle this vicious mask of the reaper?

2 million dead.
300,000 orphaned.
100 days. 
259,000 buried in
3 mass graves 
in Kigali alone.

Children — 
their lives preserved in pictures lining red walls,
wide eyed and wonderful 
— murdered.
Stabbed, bludgeoned, burned, hacked —
to witness is to weep.

The “stench of death”
replaced by freshly trimmed trees
in the Forest of Memory. 

Atrocity accomplished incrementally,
recovery realized intentionally 
by a country searching for unity
in its people and our present.