Without thought or conscious knowledge of the anniversary of the Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi, Kenya, we watched the documentary about it on Friday night, 9/19/2014, the one-year anniversary. In 2012, visiting good friends, chosen family, we went to the mall on more than one occasion. I didn’t know when I started watching the documentary if I would be able to keep watching. I did. When it finished, I started writing a Mime’s Message.

Not Here, Not Anywhere ~ Brent Harris

Watching scenes of terror in a place where I have been
Ten thousand miles away and more; it is all so obscene
Dispassionate narration, interviews with numb survivors
From indiscriminate murder, fathers, children, mothers

Gunman claim revenge for their women, children killed
So senseless, madness with which people become filled
Knowing the pain, loss of close family murdered, gone
How could they inflict this pain on others or on anyone

Schizophrenic slaughter, bullets fired with an, I am sorry
Feeling powerless, action taken, blood, terror, false glory
A fear that I have felt, though not to this usurious extent
Carjacked at gunpoint, no blood, survived, my mind bent

I truly do not understand how we allow any of this to go on
Have the few who have the most convinced us they have won
That since we cannot touch them, we must attack each other
Murder all sense, turn sister on sister and brother on brother

So the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, hits too near home
Knowing those so near and dear to us might well have come
Memory of an outdoor café, where now watching people die
Young filled with zealous hate, martyrdom, no honest why

On darker days I do despair humanity has become stagnant
Lost, never to find our path to home no matter what we want
I try then to remember that all things will transform, in time
Perhaps not in time for us, and mine the message of a mime