POLITICAL Poem: , by Courtney Waller

ACT ONE
Nineteen-Ninety four

This was the year I would learn what human beings were capable of
The thing any one of us could be capable of with enough fear behind our eyes.
Mutating like a virus, that fear will always turn to hatred
Hatred morphing into violence.

My adolescent naivete and idealism was shattered in the very place that I had learned it; the
school library.
It was fifth period study hall of my sophomore year
Study hall was a small break from the standardized academic pursuits, which had shielded the
truth from us in the form of lessons written by the victorious, who did not want their secrets
spilled.
I was fond of the library, and the extensive newspaper section, that my parents could not afford
to provide at home.
Among the newspapers, an article caught my eye.
I can still smell the heavy and redolent ink of the newspapers , and the sweet, overpowering
scent of the lilacs in bloom outside the giant picture window, to the left of the newspaper racks.

A woman in a village in Rwanda met her fate at the end of a machete
But that wasn’t enough for the eyes that hold the hatred
She had been with child.
They took the child from her womb, with the same machete that had taken her life only
moments before.
The report would say they found the baby sliced head to toe
“Like a stick of salami”

I was unable to eat cold cuts for weeks afterwards.
I haven’t eaten salami in thirty years.
Those words burned into my memory, as if the page was still in front of me to this day

The betrayal came,not from finding out what people are capable of,
Rather, the ultimate betrayal came from those I had been taught were meant to do the right
thing and yet they had refused.
The man in a suit, hiding behind a state sanctioned podium, said it “wasn’t genocide”.
The man in the suit was “not prepared to use that word”.
The salami child had merely died from an “act of genocide” being committed, he said.
.
My idealism died that day, with tears hidden behind the non-fiction shelves before the bell rang.
I was meant to go about the day, as if this hadn’t occurred.
The man in the suit, the mother, and her mutilated child were meant to be inconsequential to the
life of a small town farm girl in Wisconsin.

ACT TWO
Twenty-Twenty Four

For months now we have watched images of children flash across screens held within the palm
of our hands
Waxy complexions and blue lips
Limp
Eyes, if open, glassy and devoid of life

Then, one day,
A baby, still in a diaper…….
……without blue lips.

‘The Tent Massacre’ they called it

My mind raced….”salami”

I felt a familiar rage mixed with grief turn my chest cold;
Little particles of ice formed around my lungs.

My son came up behind me. He was nearly as old as I had been all those years ago. He was taller, towering over me, peering at the screen, as the images played over and over in an unceremonious and endless loop.

“What horror movie is this?” he asked.

I could not answer.
I stared at the screen, the ice particles growing colder and spreading into my stomach.

A man in a suit arrives at a podium like clockwork.
The flash of camera lights surrounds him.
Reporters ask questions that demand answers
“How many charred bodies are too many?”

“It’s not genocide” he says.
Although this time the men in suits can not even bring themselves to admit;
“acts of genocide” are being committed.

And so, a new generation finds themselves with shattered idealism and the realization of what
men are capable of;
And what the virus of fear is capable of when it mutates unencumbered

Many are silent;
Clinging to the naive belief that complicity arrives with words.