And they all perished and Became memories of the past Halima, the lover of whitemen, I passed you as a child of eight, on the street with one of your lovers, one of your victims. He stood, balding and sandy-haired and bespectacled, arms akimbo, listening as you denied your status on the street, wanting to believe the lies you swore were the truth, knowing in despair, that the truth was dark and brooding and fatal. Those days, the deaths were swift, and horrific, The faces that stared back were emaciated, and desperate, The death had robbed them all dignity of dying and the dignity of living It wasted them in the wards, eyes that couldn’t hide Minds that could not fathom the depth of their sorrows, Memories painful, dreams cut short. They died to our horror and in their trauma and in our trauma, modern day pariahs, twenty-first century outcasts, we were all victims of the horror that swept furiously. It was a complete death, of the soul and mind, we the liv