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The Dance
By Siamanto
And as her tears drowned in her blue
eyes,
On a field of ash where Armenian
life was still dying,
This is what the witness of our
horror, the German woman narrated:
"This story which I tell you and
which cannot be told,
I saw with my cruel human eyes,
From the window of my safe house
which looked on hell,
Crushing my teeth from my terrible
rage...
With my cruelly human eyes I saw
.
It was in Garden city, which was
turned to a pile of ashes.
The corpses were piled high to the
top of the trees,
And from the waters, from the fountains,
from the streams, from the roads,
The rebellious murmur of your blood...
Still speaks now its vengeance into
my ears...
O, don't be shocked when I tell you
this story which cannot be told...
Let men understand the crime of
man against man,
Under the sun of two days, on the
road to the cemetery
The evil of man against man,
Let all the hearts of the world
know...
That morning in death's shadow was
a Sunday,
The first and helpless Sunday which
rose over the corpses,
When inside my room, from evening
to dawn,
Bending over the agony of a girl
slashed with a sword,
I was wetting her death with my
tears...
Suddenly from afar a black, beastly
mob
Brutally whipping the twenty brides
who were with them,
Stood in a vineyard singing songs
of debauchery.
Leaving the poor dying girl on her
mattress,
I approached the balcony of my window
which looked on hell...
In the vineyard the black mob became
a forest.
A savage roared to the brides: "You
must dance,
You must dance when our drum sounds."
And the whips started wildly cracking
on the bodies
Of the Armenian women who were missing
death...
Twenty brides, hand in hand, started
their round dance...
The tears flowed from their eyes
like wounds,
Ah, how much I envied my wounded
neighbor,
Because I heard, that with a peaceful
moan,
Cursing the universe, the poor beautiful
Armenian girl,
To her young dove spirit gave wings
toward the stars...
In vain I moved my fists against
the mob.
"You must dance", roared the furious
crowd,
"You must dance until your death,
lustfully and lasciviously,
Our eyes are thirsty for your movements
and your death..."
The twenty beautiful brides fell
to the ground exhausted...
"Stand up", they shrieked, waving
their naked swords like snakes...
Then someone brought to the mob
a barrel of oil...
O, human justice, let me spit at
your forehead...!
They anointed the twenty brides
hastily with that liquid...
"You must dance", they roared, "here
is a perfume for you which even Arabia does not have..."
Then they ignited the naked bodies
of the brides with a torch,
And the charcoaled corpses rolled
from dance to death...
In my terror I closed the shutters
of my window like a storm,
And approaching my lonely dead girl
I asked:
"How can I dig my eyes out, how
can I dig them out, tell me...?" |
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