When the genocide began I started writing daily notes. The notes, many of them handwritten in various notebooks, were disconnected lines, images, stories I’d read or heard. Some of them evolved into poems, included in this collection; but it wasn’t until Day 167 that — having heard about a mother who was able to save one of her children but not the others, and a doctor who was saving the amputated limbs of wounded children, putting the limbs into boxes labeled with their names — I felt the urgency to document these tragedies in a whole poem every day, and that is what I will do until the genocide ends.
Day 366
(the second year begins)
Don’t say we are dead. Tell
whoever you’re speaking to
that we walked the beaches, planted gardens,
held one another’s hands with tenderness on summer nights,
watched our children grow, sang to them,
bathed their soft bodies at the end of the day,
stirred pots in our kitchens, stood
at the window taking in the fragrances of herbs,
waiting while the moon rose above the rooftops.
Don’t speak of our deaths without remembering
that we lived, that we loved the sea, that we leapt
with joy under its waves, fell asleep
listening to its rhythm. Don’t forget
that we tasted peaches, strawberries, melons
and felt the sweet juices run down our chins. Did I
mention the breeze? The rain? The first
rains of autumn? The smell of earth
when the rains dried, when sunlight
illumined the drops that still clung to the branches?
Say we took all this in. Say we refused
to leave ourselves behind. Say we were alive
the way everyone is alive, that we told stories
about what we saw and heard, that when they
murdered us, each of us bore a world
away with us; but, like the impression left
in sand when one has been lying for hours
under the sun, the shapes
of our souls persist in the fetid air, the broken
shadows, the shredded fields where we
will not be forgotten.