My memory opens up, painfully, at the sound of persistent calls. I am emerging from the long tunnel where I have lain low.
Thousands of faces disappeared
Without knowing why. They call out to me
They are full of distress
Humiliation
Blazing with hunger
Snuffed out by thirst.
The tense look of a friend whose flesh bore the marks of a dog’s bite
With each step she was losing her life.
The overwhelmed look of another woman beaten to death.
Hundreds of fading looks, exhausted from long hours of roll calls.
On thousands of lost faces, the dejection of a life terminated too soon.
Trucks come and go down their long lanes of despair
Filled with lives, packed tight, their eyes looking into the distance.
Holding out their emaciated hands, clinging onto life with wasted screams.
The smokestack crackles.
The sky is low, gray and yellow.
We breathe in their ashes as the wind blows them away.
Thirty years later
I tremble as I push through the thick wall of my memory.
So that all those looks begging for hope
Do not vanish
Into the dust.