---

What horrors we wage
in the light of day,
bodies left decaying
for the world to see.

Conakry,
September, two thousand nine.
Moïse Dadis,
junta chief, will not resign
his command
to sworn democratic law.
Thousands band
to demand that he withdraw.

Crowd trapped.
Soldiers
gather,
guns drawn.
Fire.

Butchery veiled in tear gas,
bayonettes puncture eyes.
Flesh strewn across the grass,
knives sever robes from thighs.
Women raped with gun barrels,
bullet through a child’s head,
howls of humans feral
as they haul away the dead.

Red berets,
elite guard,
murder-crazed,
a city scarred.
Stores they loot,
ribs they snap
under boot.
Cadavers wrapped.

“C’est du
jamais-vu,”
they said.
“Pourquoi
nous, Allah?”
they pled
to absent god.

At the morgue a mother
seeks out her son.
No remains were found.
A desperate father
reaches for his gun,
his daughter bound
in an army base,
used by soldiers in turn,
‘til a rapist discerned
her familiar face,
and, shamed, set her
free.

She speaks no word to her doctor,
for fear her pain disgrace her kin.
For weeks she dared not sleep or dream.

Camara denied blame for the atrocity:
“The military’s beyond my control.”
The chief of his guard drew a pistol
and fired a round in the president’s
skull.

He survives,
abdicates.
A flood of
candidates
compete in Guinea’s
first truly
democratic vote.

Anarchy
mars the year.
Election
frauds unclear.
Will of the people:
Guineans elect
Alpha Condé.

The girl’s suicide,
the son never found,
the butchers alive.
The butchers alive.

---

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