Roy Jacobstein

                    —A.P. Wire Photo, The New York Times, 12/21/97
		 	      
                           People say they have to express their emotions.
                           I'm sick of that.  Photography doesn't teach you
                           to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
                                                          — Berenice Abbott
They're downstream now, 
beyond the falls, 
eight or ten, or more, 
out of the turbulence.
The Kagera River churns 
onward into Tanzania, leaving 
them behind in the backwash.
The smooth stone outcropping 
of their native land hovers 
over them like a mother seal. 
They huddle against her 
black flanks the way they leaned 
into one another last week 
in the Church for safety 
in numbers. And now 
that the machetes have passed, 
the torsos are looking down 
into the debris-choked shallows 
for their missing heads and limbs.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Witness, 1999