Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda

In Kigali’s blue dusk, where the hills hold their breath,
the Hôtel de la Reine—its bronze doors heavy as a relic—
stood silent, a fortress of copper and hope,
its windows staring out into a city that once sang.

Inside, the walls bent under the weight of thousands,
their drawers a living archive of slippers, a dropped handkerchief,
a jar of coffee forgotten, a child's crayon still on a nightstand—
the ordinary, made urgent by the tremor of a nation.

The staff, worn in the lull of prayers,
moved like wraiths through corridors that echoed
with whispered names, the vow to keep the rest—
a creed spoken in their lips, a faith in the unspoken.

They watered the lilies at the courtyard’s heart,
tended the gutters, fed the mouths that would not see dawn,
yet in that sterile light there were flashes
of kinship stitched into the night by a single obeah of kindness.

Outside, the gunfire marched like a drum,
the smell of gunmetal, the hush of a dying sky.
Inside, a room with a cracked window—
the only thing left sounding.

The Hôtel became a hymn of survival,
each heartbeat echoing through the hallways,
rod-fed by resolve, its silhouette a promise,
a monument that did not weep but stood.

When the last of the night’s terror faded,
the rain washed the dust from the boards.
Silently, the staff arranged the rooms,
ready to shelter the world again.

In a small, guarded corner of an African city,
the name Hôtel Rwanda is not just a place, but
a testament whispered in the clink of glasses,
a memory dressed in cuirass of resilience.

It reminds us that a building can cradle an entire wrong,
that courage can be whispered in the flicker of a torch,
and that compassion, once lit, keeps the nights dark.