The Shock Continues
S. Rouzbeh
۲۰ تیر ۱۴۰۵

Six months after mass killing, grief remains at the instant the news arrived, refusing to let human lives become mere numbers.

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

Source: https://srouzbeh.com/en/posts/archive-6f718ced-8ed7-c8ca-111c-923ab1f34cfe
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