*Her name? Her name is Generose,
See now how her story flows*
through the sounds of war anew,
our ruler coming out to say:
‘Bombs! Again! Away!’ Through
minions mincing with regret
at what we need to do and why
evil ones must die.
Through the soldiers jumping to;
through me, and my kind, left bereft
behind, nowhere to be
except here, hoping to woo
a person like you.
I hope you can you come with me
I need us to get to a place
far from here, where four or five
million...? No. Let me begin again...
Let me start with yesterday.
I was clearing my house,
‘and not before time’
is what you would say if you’d seen it.
I was making two piles
– to hold or to go? -
when I found it: the book.
Lying open, face down, waiting
for me to return.
I shrugged off the me who likes
to think she can think
herself safe, and picked it back up
where I’d stopped, and dropped,
down again into that wood
where four million people once died.
(Or was it five?)
Yes, genocide.
*One woman’s name was Generose,
see now how her story goes.*
When they’d hear the trucks of the killers
roar in, the villagers would grab the hands
of their children and flee to the trees.
At night they’d lie down on dead leaves,
knuckling dirt into dreams.
One day Generose and her family
were too slow to go. The soldiers
came in with machete and gun,
hacked her husband to death, then
made her climb up to lie down
on her own kitchen table,
in front of her daughter and son.
“We’re hungry,” they said as they
cut off her leg and sliced it
into six pieces and fried them
up in her pan.
*Yes, name her name, it’s Generose.
Listen. Listen to how it goes.*
They ordered her children to partake.
The boy knew how to refuse
and was shot on the spot. The girl,
in terror, attempted to try. I ask you:
can you imagine? Not the family
so much as those soldiers,
the teaching it took to create them.
(Where this happened was already famed
for kings who came from afar to take
what they would. What one liked
to take was the hands
of the men he’d enslaved,
the ones who had failed to bring in
their quota of crop. And chop
them off.)
Consumed by the sight of the girl
trying to force her mother
as meat through her mouth, the men
somehow allowed Generose down
from the table to crawl from the house.
And so, somehow, she survived.
And so, she has heard, did her daughter.
And so she believes that some day
she’ll see her again and she works
every which way for that day.
Why tell you all this?
May I reverse the question,
Ask you how you feel when you
hear it? That’s why the poet
wrote her book, though to regurgitate
that leg made her sick for weeks after,
to show how how the same choices
call to us all. Kings will do what kings do,
soldiers too, and if you don’t
want to know, I won’t keep you.
Let me back to the book that knows
what to own, what should be let go.
Let me wait in the place
I’ve come to call home
with those who decline
to oppose. Let me hold to my hope
that the girl might be found,
and enfolded again, with
their two mourned dead men
so we all might recall what we’ve been
taught so well to forget:
the long-lasting hold, the cast iron
caress of the mother.
* Her name, this time, was Generose,
and that is how the story goes.*