Dragonfly

She is forgotten in all the texts about revolution. She is never mentioned in the folk songs that ring out nightly from mountain to mountain. She is never casted in plaster and bronze, never carved from the native woods, never chiseled out of imported granite. She is one of the forgotten.

But she was the first line of defense. She was the food that filled the stomachs of any fighter willing to go back for one more day. She was also the one who dragged back the lifeless remains of those who did not make it back for one more day. She was the revolutionary greeting and the goodbye.

She was the first to shoot when the death squads came into the village, and she was the first to get raped in response to it. She was the first to protect a child from rape, and she got layered with bullets in response to it. She was the first to die, but has become the last remembered. Even now, her name has slipped my own lips. Its time to get a grip, but with 400 dead, the names of dead just slip lips. So we call them the forgotten, but I have done everything except forget them.