_____"I had it in mind/ to slay Kaleva's kin
to get the Sampo to Northland." Runo 42
"That was a good hunt. There were a lot of rabbits there."
--Serbian soldier, 7/13/95
in the moonlight the back hoes
wove into the stony field
Nezad Avdic, 17, wounded
collapsed sideways
piled bodies made the field
seem covered by low bushes
Hurem Suljic, 55, crippled
boarded the bus as ordered
they were taken to Bratunac
put into a warehouse
busloads of Muslim men
came and went
400 crowded in
soldiers took 40 out in back
young, strong, virile ones
beat them, killing them
their animal screams
sounded like a slaughterhouse
next day they ordered
10 men to bury them
that afternoon the Serbs
separated Nezad and the others
put them in a schoolhouse
sent their women on a march
Dutch peacekeepers called for air strikes
U.N. commander Bernard Janvier
vetoed the idea
Srebreniça was already lost
Bosnian Serbian Army General
Satko Mladic threatened to massacre
diplomats urged Serbian President
Slobodan Milosevic to rein Mladic in
afraid more peacekeepers would be held hostage
the Dutch looked on quiet
while Mladic's Serbs
put the men on buses
the war crime tribunal at the Hague
arrested Mladic in 1999
we saw it all on television.
don't you remember? during dinner?
with green peas and corn
french fries and burgers
"Faster! Faster! Go!
Go!"
nurse Christine Schmidt wrote
"Everybody should feel the
violence on the faces
of Bosnian Serb soldiers."
satellite photos on July 13, 1995
from a U-2 spy plane
2 weeks later showed up
only some freshly turned fields
at another school nearby
2,500 blindfolded men boarded school buses
they took them to the damp moonlit fields
shot them in small rows of four abreast
Suljic nestled under two dead men
saw it all
Hakija Husseinovic, age 52
taken to an agricultural warehouse
Serbs shot through the window
with automatic rifles and grenade launchers
he covered himself with two bodies
waited for two days
a priest expressed no remorse at the killings
only at tortures
"I would kill a Turk
but wouldn't torture."
in October thousands
of men and boys
captured around Banja Luca disappeared
with no word on their fate
to Dayton, Ohio's Wright
Patterson Air Force Base
Mlosovic came for proximal peace talks
sitting in separate rooms
they passed messages back and forth
the night the story broke
in the New York Times
the ABC Nightly News featured
a story about the miracle of science
showing us how the human brain
processes information and where
by now it is all so prosaic
Rwanda, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala,
Armenia, the Holocaust, Tibet, Cambodia
but no one will ever plumb
black depths of the human heart
the tribal vendettas will be perpetuated
through the centuries
revenge breeds revenge
blood tells blood rules and blood damns
til the ozone layer dissipates
and the sun burns earth
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