The Debate!

Last night I watched the documentary
That showed the stark reality
Of the past that has doomed our future
The hour long commentary complete
With graphic illustration of the horror
That I lived through
Wishing every moment that I would die
Like all my friends and family
Blown away by bullets
Slashed by machetes
Or ravaged by diseases
Only peculiar to war-zones

How I got through those nine weeks
The commentator could not tell
And neither can I
For when you thought
You had buried enough bodies
And encouraged survivors
With words that were hollow
Even to your own ears
Another wave of bullets rang out
Into the night
Putting out any light
That was at the end of the long tunnel

Then came the debate
Was it a massacre
Or was it really genocide
In my motherland
One candidate argued his first point
That the killings did not go on
Long enough
While his opponent pointed out
Intelligently, he did
That most of those who died
Did so in combat
He did not add that our oldest soldiers
Were only as old as his ten year old fifth grader

So here then is the analysis,
First, the number of days the horror lasts
Is as critical to the qualification
As is the number of people dead
And secondly, those who die
Must be sitting ducks
People just waiting to die
No will and no inclination to survive
For if the people fought back
It was argued
They became combatants
And not genocide victims!

The Documentary commentator
Took a commercial break
Giving us a moment to take it all in
To reflect and take sides if we would
I remembered then
How the sprays of bullets
Had showered the air around us
Seemingly with no end in sight
It would have been wonderful
To take a commercial break
While I figured out
Which orphan to hold onto
And which widow to comfort
Before we were all blown to pieces

We did get a break I must admit
By tacit agreement it would seem
A temporary ceasefire always heralded
The weekly flight of the Red Cross team
As they landed on the local dusty airstrip
Bringing a little hope for a few hours,
A couple of professional photographers
To capture our hopelessness
And the documentary writers, of course
Who so eloquently carried our plight
To the rest of the world
That they may better debate our fate!

The debate was soon over
The second speaker won
According to the polls that night
He felt that the killings did not go on
Long enough
It seemed only long to those of us
Dodging bullets and burying the bodies
But it was only ninety days
In which about a million people died
Actually nine hundred and fifty six thousand
Two hundred and thirty seven to be exact
Mercifully, he will never know
What it was really like
No, his knowledge was drawn safely
From statistics and a very well presented
Documentary!