Forty Thousand Heartbeats

Forty Thousand Heartbeats

S. Rouzbeh

Those forty thousand people

were not numbers;

not cold statistics in reports,

not names

left in the margins of notebooks

silently gathering dust.

They

were Iran’s beating hearts;

veins in the wrist of the earth

still

beating with tomorrow’s pulse.

Each one

was a window

opening onto a different air;

an eye

that, behind smoke and bullets,

still

had not believed in darkness.

They had not come

to end in the earth;

they had come

so that the earth

might remember

that it could

be a homeland again.

Death

dug a pit

before their feet;

but they

passed beyond the pit

and became a road.

The bullet wanted

to close their mouths;

but their names

passed beyond the walls of fear,

settled in the silence of every home,

and told every mother:

your child

did not fall alone.

We,

before that immense sacrifice,

are more than mourners;

we are in their debt.

In debt to mothers’ tears,

in debt to fathers’ hands,

in debt to teenagers

who, before

they had tasted life,

stood as tall as freedom.

They went,

but the road remained;

they fell,

but the flag did not fall.

And we,

until the day when dawn

rests upon Iran’s brow,

write their names

not on stone,

but on our footsteps;

so the road

will not forget

whose lives were the price

of keeping it open.