What's a Dog know about Morality?

Was listening to the radio and came across the interview with a Scottish woman who had been married to a Rwandan Church Minister. The marriage had been going through a rough patch and she had left the country to see her sister in Zimbabwe. While there the killings started in Rwanda. When she came back she expected the worst:

This is her story.

What’s a dog know about morality

“In Rwanda 800,000 were murdered in 100 days.”

They welcomed me smiling, careful, watching

As I retraced myself into the land.

Their glassed eyes spoke of an aged bloodied,

A generation ghosted by a neighbour’s hand,

Casually directed, casually dispatching

Life, friendships ended, victims of a creed

Blind to all but its self, its new strength

Powered by hate, death’s deliberate scent.

The brochure showed plain and mountain clear,

Skies burnt to gold, sun lighting green the ground.

I found an earth crawling with abortions,

Its weather moist with blood, chill with fear.

The brochure showed tall children at play,

Parents, stilled, leaning happy on their hoes.

I returned, passing children in fatigues,

Armoured, gun barrels ploughing shallow graves.

The brochures showed orchards, fruit heavy,

Temptations branched, shadowed by the red rock.

Stretched before me gardens weeded with skulls;

Empty eyes ploughed, seedless, grounded by the truck.

I approached my home, hunting my husband’s face,

Found bones laced with the leaf, his lines, his trace

Obliterated, marrow married with the dust.

‘They took him away,’ the answer to my quest.

A child captains the chair my husband carved,

Ignorant of the books my husband read

He looks out into the plot where still charred

Flesh stench hangs, where dogs fed on the dead,

Unclothed the man from the bone.

But who, I ask, cast the first stone?

And,

What’s a dog know about morality?

copyright (c) 2005 Pilgermann BM