April is Genocide Prevention Month

Here's a poem I have been tinkering with ever since April 1 when my MSN Home page spit out the information that April was genocide awareness month. It seemed so bizzare, almost obscene, to try to stuff something as immense and horrific as genocide into a month. As so often happens, the poem went in a somewhat different direction than I expected.

Upon Learning that April Is Genocide Prevention Month

As if you didn’t have enough to do, April,
here you come babbling about genocide prevention.

Sweet, hippie-girl April, with your daffodils everywhere
shouting their happy yellow song and waving at me as I pass,
your grass so green it hurts my eyes,
and the pale green leaves of trees,
like tiny cupped hands that catch and drink the misty air.
Oh, April, bright, fragile, hopeful April,
all the tender trees are dressed in their thin green-gold ingénue frocks,
ready to dance the night away.
Will you cancel the prom?

And what would you have us do?
Shall we send a flower to a warlord? A bouquet of daisies
to a mother as she spreads thin sand
over slaughtered sons and daughters?
Sweet, foolish, flower-garlanded April,
do you think that a few choruses of “All that we ask is
give peace a chance” will do the trick?

What is Darfur to you, dear April? Death in The Congo?
Have you seen those boys holding big guns in their small hands?

Oh, sweet, foolish, hopeful April,
do you really think a month
is long enough?

Rise up my love, fair April, and
spend the year with me in beautiful, downtown Gaza,
luxuriate on the Sudan sands, experience the lush, Congo green.
We shall weave garlands of bones to wear round our necks
and dance the genocide prevention dance,
our hands stretched upward, eyes wide,
mouths shouting soundlessly,
“No! No! No! No! No! No! No!”

(It won’t make a difference to anyone, April,
but at least next year, when you’re
asked to be Genocide Prevention month, you can say,
“No. I did that last year.”)

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 18, 2009 at 2:57 AM

    Hi Dave, what a thought provoking poem! When we have so much, it is difficult to allow ourselves to be permeated by the ugly truths of life "out there". Just stumbled on to this site - what a treasure! Catherine

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Santorum Takes His Gospel of Individualism to Dordt College

“You go to Dordt College and you ask me that question?” Rick Santorum said to Ryan Walters, Dordt College freshman, when Santorum spoke in Sioux Center recently. And the question that Santorum seemed amazed at was this: “If not for our [government] social programs, how can we take care of our poor?” Santorum asked the audience who should take care of the poor, and the answer he got first was “the church,” and then, the answer he wanted, it’s up to “the individual” to take care of himself. Before we parse those three answers, I want to comment on Santorum’s amazement at Walters question. Why was he so amazed? I can only speculate. Santorum was amazed because he had been led to believe that Dordt College is a bastion of conservative Republican political views. Where did he get that idea? Again, I can, only speculate. Perhaps his colleague in the House of Representatives, Steve King, told him that. Perhaps the fact that Sioux County is called the most conservative county in the country in...
Read more

A "Plumbline" I wrote that will run on KDCR Friday, 3/19

What Glenn Beck Does Not Know Should one even bother to reply to Glenn Beck? Clearly, he does not use reason when he tries to convince folks to think like he does. Often, he attempts to frighten people by using words that carry all sorts of emotional baggage. Sometimes he talks as if he knows a lot about something, but in reality he’s not very well informed. I would hope that people would see through this sort of manipulation, but I hear that Beck has a huge following—even in a town like Sioux Center. So I am going to respond to something he recently said. Beck said that Christians should check their church’s web pages for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” and if they find them, they should resign from the church. Why? Because those words are really code words for communism and Nazism. Now for those Christian Reformed folk listening, if you bother checking the website of The Christian Reformed Church in North America, you will discover—if you did not already kno...
Read more

Doing Something Useful

Image
As I write this, two men are in my kitchen, sanding and sawing and hammering. I know them slightly, they are good men, a father and son team that restores old floors. We discovered a fir floor underneath the linoleum of our kitchen, and we hired these men to take off the layer of gunk—linoleum adhesive, I suppose—and make the floor smooth. Some of the boards were damaged and there were other places where non-flooring boards had been inserted in a remodeling project of the past , so our workers had to replace some of these boards with fir, carefully fitting in the tongue and grooved old fir pieces they had found at a store in Paulina. The father of the team must be 75 years old but he crawls around the floor on his knees with no knee pads (his son uses them) and seems happy in his work. He saw my boat in the garage and commented on it, saying, he found no pleasure in fishing: “A half hour on the lake and I’m ready to come in.” His joy seems to be his work. His son, who knows I recently ...
Read more