Photoshoot at El Mozote, El Salvador (Population 901 in 1981)
– In memory of Rufina Amaya
It’s a formal occasion. She has on gloves.
She holds the infant’s dress before her
like she’s choosing something
for a baptism. It is, after all, a christening
of sorts, a whole village to be assembled.
It takes time to lay them all out, an array of
special tools, collections of brushes,
instruments, a whole team of meticulous
experts in forensics had to fly
in from Argentina. This is not a miracle
any one can perform. The Vatican had no use
for bodies, nothing to say about the delicate relics,
the infants unearthed, had no comment
when the word came down from
the Pentagon: massacres can’t be taken on
faith. All of them dead,
the entire village,
but Rufina Amaya,
who crawled away into the dark,
crouched between the trees,
the crab apples and the pine,
who heard her son, Cristino
cry out, “Mommy, mommy they’re killing us.”
Her words shook the gates at Fort Benning.
She spoke before the litany began,
the hours-long calling out
of the dead and disappeared,
the counting off of names
like the slow beads of a rosary
made of the chipped, the shattered
fragments of children’s bones,
one that seems like its beads go on
forever.
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