Lessons (Poetry)

See the wide-eyed piccaninny -
orphaned in the bloody coup -
Oxfam-shirted, legs stick-skinny,
caught on camera, staring through

a foreign lens, black face in focus -
Africa's half-savage child -
plagued by fear and Aids and locusts,
Christian-taught but semi-wild.

Civil war, through long grass creeping,
conjures death from heat and dust,
where bones of missionaries lay sleeping,
satisfied their lives were just.

The White Man played at education,
taught them all his western tricks,
gathered tribes into a Nation,
gave them God and politics.

And now those seeds of knowledge, scattered
carelessly - thrown far and wide -
have spawned a monster, cruel, besplattered
with the blood of genocide.

And, half in horror, half in anger,
the witness braves a hostile sun,
counts the corpses in Rwanda,
clicks the shutter and moves on.