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What if I turned the thermostat to Heat, and my furnace stayed cold?
What if I had no furnace—if the hinges had fallen off my doors,
     and the doors had been burned for firewood, and my house
     lay open to the hostile air?
What if had no house?

What if the supermarket had no hamburger?
What if the Taco Bell had no tacos; the gas station, no gas, no air,
     no Gatorade in its refrigerated case?
V\hat if all departments in department stores sold the same brand
     of Nothing?

What if there were no stores—just rubble that used to be walls?
V\hat if armies, like waves in a trough. rolled back and forth
     across the country; killing everyone they saw?
What if the years of ease stopped like a movie—a romantic
     comedy—when the film burns through?

What if nobody was left to change the reel?
Then I would do, each dawn. the Dance of the Victim-in-Waiting.
     followed by the Dance of Spared-for-Now.
I would say the Prayer of So-Far-So-Good each night I survived.

However tired, before I slept I'd make the signs of Mayhem, a
     Kill Them Not Me.
Picking through rubble for food, I'd crack every rat bone, and
     smear my face with mud to show allegiance to who've
     Holds the Gun.
Those times I griped about traffic, sent back a steak, moped
     bed because I wasn't more talented and loved,

Would fade until they seemed to happen in a mythic place
Where good people are rewarded with eternal peace,
Their loved ones greeting them with harps and kisses, no
     matter how their corpses look, or how they died.

CHARLES HARPER WEBB is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where has received the Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Achievement Award, and the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award.  He is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Liver, which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize, and Reading the Water, which won the S.F. Morse Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Pushcart Prize.

"Reading About Rwanda" first appeared in The Seattle Review.

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