Amid the scorched lands, the birds no longer sing. They vanish into the embers, taking with them those who, every morning, used to listen to their melodies with wonder. At the heart of an unbearable inferno, one that even the greatest sacred texts could not describe, these questions echo :
« Can I still love ? Can I still be loved ? »
The love of a lifetime vanishes in an instant before your eyes ; a father, a mother, a child, a lifelong friend, a beloved pet...
The disappearance becomes all the more harrowing when it has no name, when it meets the chilling silence of a world in disarray.
And so, everything dies. Without time, without even the possibility, to grieve for those we have lost. The one you loved, who only yesterday smiled at you, becomes tomorrow a familiar and tender face, bloodied in a crude bag ; not far from a child reduced to dust by a one-ton bomb, an adolescent burned alive, a mother and her child who starved to death in each other's arms after surviving countless trials.
« Why do I exist?
Why is my existence unwanted ?
Why is my life an offense and my death a relief ? »
They have meticulously stripped a people of their humanity and dignity. Yet history had already shown us what the power of a few men is capable of : subjugating, oppressing, annihilating all that stands against their doctrine.
The “people of darkness”, he said. Over 200,000 souls have ascended to the light of another realm, freed from human ignominy and the horrors of war. They will have no commemorative plaques, no images, no videos. No trace. All will be erased, reduced to dust, into oblivion.
But those who dare to show compassion and refuse to look away, they will remember the lost lives those lives that others tried to erase with words, with subjugation, with the manipulation of minds, always seeking to rationalize a profound evil, as was done during the Great Wars : always a “just cause” to eradicate a people, until the apex of horror is reached, haunting the nights of those who, deep down, had consented to the machinery of death.
I would rather die enlightened than let my soul darken, consumed by apathy or that vehement, sometimes insidious hatred that devours everything in its path, like a blaze inexorably engulfing lands that once brimmed with hope.
«There, where the birds were free to sing and soar, from the river to the sea, alighting gently on the trees that had witnessed their ancestors' birth. They cradled the forest in their melodious symphony, while the trees answered with a silent echo, a secret that will forever remain beyond our reach.
May all birds be born and remain free until the end of time.»
Younis M.