Forty Thousand Heartbeats
S. Rouzbeh
۱۱ تیر ۱۴۰۵

Those killed are remembered as living hopes rather than statistics, leaving a debt of remembrance and a path towards freedom.

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.

Source: https://srouzbeh.com/en/posts/archive-f5501284-5c97-3475-d47f-d528d9349e34
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