for Claire
 
sweeping slowly, a melanated hand
around the wooden handle
of a broom; on the same street,
a chocolate hand in mine
swinging slowly to the rhythm
of our sandals in the sandy soil,
with a thousand miles behind us
and a million more to go

when she speaks, I let the Rs and Ws
roll over me as they bounce off her
protruding belly — one year from now
she'll be teaching those letters
to a mouth born of her own flesh

in twenty years, I wonder
if she'll remember the story
I've already misplaced in the mass
of memorialized strangers —
her story of those shaken days.
                        

for Elvis
 
The number dead increases
with my desire to travel
over an ocean and back
in time, to that afternoon
of waiting without worrying
what exactly we waited for,
only playing away an hour
with a game of hacky sack
 
you wanted to join, but
there was work to be done,
and those of us with less
responsibility than you
stayed to speak a language
we all assumed
the others knew.
 
I wanted to impress, 
not knowing, then,
you had once been on track
to play professionally —
soccer, that is — but soon
all that mattered
was the ball,
and the sun,
and the sweat,
and the dirt,
and the smiles,
and everything seemed
right with the world.
 
If we could recreate that day
tomorrow, I wonder if it would 
outshine our nostalgia, or bind 
our lives to a happier time,
when our feet dictated 
the globe’s direction, not
the other way around.
                        

“We [want] to wake up the international community, foreign 
countries and Rwanda itself. To remind them that we also exist.”
—Paul Rusesabagina[1]
 
Words are few from the accused,
but in the story, three stand out:
murder — arson — terrorism.
Charges against a Rwandan hotelier
Hollywood loved. Seated in his cell,
outside the mosquito net, he is no more
nor less protected from
the clear and present danger of dissent 
on what was once the caged man’s turf. 
Spies and singers dead pave the way 
for history to repeat itself,
as years drag on with one long-standing,
unopposable “president.” Memories reshape 
themselves until their black-and-white
narratives have blurred to gray reality,
and we are left with the threat,
“Nothing has changed.”

[1] New York Times article on Rusesabagina