The Shock Continues

The Shock Continues

They killed them,

but their deaths

did not end that day.

The bullet

tore through their bodies,

and the news

slowly

reached our souls.

Six months have passed

and we are still

in that first instant of the news;

the very moment

when numbers

stepped out of the page

and each one

became a human face.

We thought

that sorrow too,

like a wound,

would one day close;

but how can anyone

hear thousands of names

and once again

be the person they were before?

No one

expected so many numbers;

numbers that had homes,

had mothers,

an unfinished dream,

and clothes

that still smelled of life.

Each time

we look at these defenceless people’s photographs,

something inside us

collapses again;

as though the news

arrived only today,

as though still

a hand lingers behind a door,

waiting for someone’s return,

someone who will never again

turn the key in the lock.

We are in shock;

not at death,

but at the scale of the crime,

at so many worlds

extinguished in a few days,

at so many futures

laid in the earth.

Six months have passed,

but time

has not gone beyond those days;

it stands in that same street,

beside those same photographs,

and still

reads the names of those killed,

one by one,

into our ears.

They killed them,

but shock

fell to those left behind;

a silent wound

that opens

whenever we see a picture.

And we,

until we know the last person’s name,

until we draw the truth

from beneath the rubble of numbers,

have no right

to grow accustomed to this sorrow.

S. Rouzbeh