I wonder what you were thinking
As you woke up, ate breakfast
Brushed your teeth, combed your hair
And walked out into the streets
And I wonder what you were thinking
As you lay in those same streets
The end of the struggle for you
The first face of Iran’s struggle for the rest of the world
I wonder what your family and friends are thinking
As they mourn the Neda they knew
And the rest of the world projects
The voice we never heard till it fell silent
What would you tell us? And would we listen
If you were not young and pretty
Immortalized by technology and death
And would we remember?
What of the tens dead and hundreds arrested the same week
The thousands languishing in prison for years
The old, the ugly, the unrecorded, the disconnected
The fickle public’s jilted media darlings?
If you had lived, what would have been your fate?
Another girl in another picture
Would you have returned to your old life like Sharbat Gula
Or would you have found a new one like Kim Phuc?
You have no answers for the world, nor it for you
The sky is full of mute questions
The bird, ah, is only a bird, and mortal
Some may remember a fallen bird, or angel
I shall remember blue and green moments
I shall remember a stone falling through water
May the stone rest gently at the bottom of the lake
May the lake carry the stone’s ripples to its shores
Do we choose to make history
Or is history made to choose us?
If we listen, we can hear an echo
If we remember, the future can be different
