NATIVE LAND

First came the scream of the dying in a bad dream, then the radio report, and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied behind their backs inside a church . . . As the days crumbled, and the victors and their victims grew in number, I hardened inside my thickening hide, until I lost my tenuous humanity. I ceased thinking of abandoned children inside blazing huts still waiting for their parents. If they remembered their grandmother's tales of many winter hearths at the hour of sleeping death, I didn't want to know, if they ever learnt the magic of letters. And the women heavy with seed, their soft bodies mown down like grain stalk during their lyric harvests; if they wore wildflowers in their hair while they waited for their men, I didn't care anymore. I burnt my truth with them, and buried uneasy manhood with them. I did mutter, on some far-off day: "There are limits", but when the days absolved the butchers, I continue to live as if nothing happened.