Meditation on darkness: a poem for the children of northern Uganda

By the setting sun we gathered,
Anticipating the moon and the log fire...

I can still summon up the remembrance
Now so fleeting, so vague, so feeble...

Yet in that moonlight,
Long gone and now almost forgotten,
I revelled and danced, and found ecstasy....

By the log fire, now fading
Like the embrace of a forgotten lover,
There we sat in the ember glow
Thrilled by lores from our elders....

Happy was the child
Who could sit at dusk and anticipate
The innumerable joys of a moonlit summer night
In the deepest heart of Africa...

Bring me back those nights, and the moon too,
And let me whirl and dance and be a child again;
Return me to the savannah, to the heart of my Africa
Where I can be a child again on a moonlit summer night....

But now I hear the moon comes no more
And darkness shrouds the summer night....

Children, too young to walk
Are stalked by death and fear worse than death...

Where we used to run and walk and dance--
There, they tell us, death now struts,
Licking its lips and mowing down the future...

At dusk the moon comes no more...
And dark is the mid-summer's night in the heart of Africa...

Dead children, maimed children, abducted children--
Children too scarred, too scared, and too traumatized to live...
These, I'm told, is now the new face of Africa....

Call them night commuters, call them invisible children,
These are the children the world has chosen to forget...

40,000, they say, flee each night to seek shelter and safety.
25,000, we are told, were violently abducted
And now stalk the night as killers and baits to be killed.

I hear they are eloquent at the United Nations
And in the United States, they talk of a new world order,
Spending billions of dollars each month to fight terrorism...

Yet these children, these little soots that have done no evil,
Cower and die in utter darkness for 20 long years,
One generation after another, living and dying in silence...

Take up their battle, I ask you -- you who can still feel
And rejoice at the sight of a moonlit summer night;
Do not allow these deaths that you can prevent....

How long shall these children wait for the moon to come?
How long will they live and be shrouded in darkness?
How long will their tormentors be hailed as protectors?

How long can a child live in darkness without dying inside?

I ask you--you who can still feel
And rejoice at the sight of a moonlit summer night,

Take up their fight and banish this darkness.

Ochoro E. Otunnu
New York, May 16, 2006
uNight Blog (www.unight.org)