A Note on the Use of the Term Genocide

by Randy Lundy

A few, scattered flakes of snow,
and you want to say they drift down
like ash from the chimneys of Auschwitz
or Birkenau, but you cannot claim that
history. Perhaps you have no right even
to write a poem in the long shadow of that
time.

And what of the sixty million dead in the Americas
in the first hundred years after contact? But that’s
too abstract. Just statistics.

And you’ll be accused of confusing, of conflating.
Let it be so. 

                              What about the hands
of each and every woman who had her child ripped
away from her by disease, hunger, or by another’s hands?
(It still goes on today.)

Can you write about that? What about those trembling
hands? A trembling like nothing you can say, not in this
or any other language, no words for that kind of pain.

Let’s do the math: that’s six hundred thousand dead each
year; fifty thousand dead per month; twelve thousand dead
per week, almost two thousand dead each day.

Four thousand hands trembling with loss every day.

Perhaps it is impossible to write a poem about such things.
Certainly, if you try, you should not speak of trees and birds
or dogs, or the violence of your childhood home. Your Irish-
Norwegian father. Your nêhiyaw mother. And fifty years later,
you, still just a frightened, confused three-year-old boy. Do not
speak of it. Do not try to make a link. Connect nothing.

Fortunately, most of those who might read this will not recognize it as a poem.
Still, if you managed to read this far, if you remember one thing when you reach
the end of this page, I ask that it be this: the pain we each carry, brother or sister,
the pain in every brown face, is not just our own.

And this is no confessional poem.

 RANDY LUNDY

is Cree, Norwegian, and Irish and is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation. He was born in the mining community of Thompson, Manitoba, and grew up in the logging community of Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan. Lundy has published four books of poetry, most recently Blackbird Song (2018) and Field Notes for the Self (2020) with the University of Regina Press, where he currently serves as editor for the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series. He recently joined the English Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough, following the university’s TRC-response search in Creative Writing, Indigenous Literatures, and Oral Traditions.