Even if those tears manifest the naïve will to try to fill the void that death leaves in your body, it is not enough.

Even the sea felt the dishonor of drowning you; relinquishing fault, it returned you to the shore already lifeless, dragging you up under the waves’ caresses and leaving you in eternal rest on the wet sand. Son of all the mothers in the world, Aylan, it is still not enough.

I see you there, stiff, governed by death, so innocent and fragile; the owners of the world are suffocated, Aylan, and argue truths, proper and improper, over the sand. It is your body that tastes like sea and smells like war. Without a voice, on the sand, you became the powerful rabid throat of the dispossessed, who drown while there is land…

Democracy languishes, dead bodies float on the sea; they have turned the Mediterranean into an enormous mass grave, the ship’s holds attest not of tears, but of death… Middle East, so far away from my feet, so close to my eyes, Aylan…

A Vietnamese girl runs naked through our memory, her clothing burnt by napalm, she is on fire, you are drowned, she screams “It burns!” as you are a synonym of our times Aylan…

The right wing of the world is knocking at the door of the magnates. Facing this overwhelming obscenity, they prefer the mass graves six feet under and the gas chambers, as no dead can escape, guaranteed.

The human race pilgrimages on a thorny path, and that’s why it is not enough to cry for you Aylan. Even if those tears manifest the naïve will to try to fill the void that death leaves in your body, it is not enough…because they want to force us to drink the barbaric water.

Translated by: Gloria Grinberg