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YouInventedMe — Rwandan Screen Time
Published: 2009-05-19 18:44:45 +0000 UTC; Views: 1804; Favourites: 63; Downloads: 11
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Description
guilt spokewith angry eyes
sounding choked
from the throats
of eight hundred thousand
ghosts
so much
for the great
white hope
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Comments: 98
The world's TV screens conspire to make us feel our impotence; your poem lends our impotence a voice.
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Goodness.. That about says it.
Proof that words don't tend to justify, they're just what's left over.
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indeed. thanks so much.
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The genocide in Rwanda, in my opinion, counts as one of the worst crimes in human history.
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I'm with you, sir. after the holocaust,
the world cried, "never again!"
they lied.
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They did. And in some respects the Rwandan genocide is even worse than the Holocaust, in that it was actually rehearsed in the 1980s, before the apocalyptic year of 1994 (when the Rwandan priests declared the world was going to end) appeared. Quite like the Holocaust, however, but to a far greater extent, the Rwandan genocide was centered on killing a very specific group of people. And it was motivated by religion, like the Holocaust was: Even now, right now, there are Rwandan priests and nuns in the dock charged with complicity in the slaughter of the ethnic Tutsi minority. It's difficult to find the words to describe the whole affair. "Horrifying," "despicable," "awful" and other such words seem to leave something out of it.
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actually survived the camps for a time and
fled to Cuba. they have numbers tattooed on
their forearms. it's something they don't really
talk about, and I don't have much experience
with that side of my family (as they are my
father's family, and I didn't meet him until
I was in my twenties).plus, neither of them
speaks English all that well, and my
grandfather is a bit senile. I can't even begin to
imagine the horror of living through either
genocide.
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What you've said is as fascinating as it is simply awful...
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I love the amount of imagery within all that minimalism.
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I also like the assonance in the middle stanza. Choked, throats, ghosts.
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Beautifully expressed: I think you made every word count, and then count again. It speaks volumes, so powerfully, with so little said so simply. The sort of deceptively easily delivered work that betrays great genius.
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ever so kind of you
thanks, jamie
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It's good (every now and then) to put a finger on the pulse of humanity.
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A good short poem.
There's a little syntactical issue with 'sounding', sans a declarative colon at 'throats'-- i.e., it reads, on first sight, as though the eyes are what is sounding from the throat, which is a bit of oddness. A comma after 'sounding' might aid that. You could use the one after 'hundred', which isn't necessary.
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I'm with you on the unnecessary comma
after hundred, and I'm off to delete it
now. there's no punctuation in the rest
of the poem, so I'm not quite sure
why it's there. haha.
thanks again for the help.
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I aspire to write like this. Hats off (she says with no hat on, but that's because I took it off?)
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Good to see some other grand minimalistic statements
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the harder sounds in the first line strike me particularly hard. i really like this piece; it is sad and dark and beautiful.
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Genocide seems to be the theme for today!
I have the strange urge to spray some ants...
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Poignant. I think Paul Dempsey said something like...
Waiting for distance and buying some time
Trying to be two hundred thousand years younger
So I could excuse myself from human kind
(i hope im making sense)
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that you are, miss. 
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chocolate is good
especially when it drowns the hemlock
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a spoon full of sugar
and all that
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Excellent poem...thanks for writing and sharing it.
A cause I support: [link]
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thanks, brendan. I actually posted
a journal semi-recently related to
invisiblechildren.com
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This is just. Pure simplicity and brilliance?
"so much
for the great
white hope"
<3
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