How many genocides have had their memorials? We ask when these transgressions might end, but we do not ask how we might end these transgressions. Reconciliation cannot begin by waiting for it; let us begin, then, by standing on the ‘other’ side. Let us no longer wait to show compassion.

 

The land is ravaged by pain, and, though unseen, silently persists. Conflicts are forgotten, loss quietened. Hence where craters are torn from the earth, we decide to build a crater. To construct a deconstructed mass of land, to remember the unremembered iniquities of man, to teach our children of their forefathers’ deeds. Or must they patch the ruin their fathers first made?

 

Amid the pastoral expanse of the park, a crater has been laid with bricks. The ground ripples with the force of its placement, where lies a belt of sand, and toward this the children bound; they frolic upon its bed, forming castles, raising grainy cities with their tiny hands, before the hill where at its heart the crater lies in mute devastation. Afar, their parents watch from the benches. From moment to moment an individual wanders to the crater. He sees the bricks, the sand. He remembers the children.