The Moving Rose - La rose (é)mouvante - 130 Street Photos after the Paris Attacks {Paris Street Photo}
The Moving Rose - La rose (é)mouvante © 2015 CHANT WAGNER
130 Street Photos after the Paris Attacks - 130 photographies de rue, après les attentats de Paris - In Memoriam
Tributes were piling high up towards the sky
Roses - an endless stream of roses - diffused their incense
Rosae, rosae, rosas, rosarum, rosis, rosis - roses brought by a procession of mourners
Who did not know each other
Who only knew about what took place
in the chaos of a night streaked with fear, red, and tears
It smelled, survivors said afterwards, of gunpowder and blood, the two dominant notes...
In the hope of softening unjust death, white, pink, red, yellow - and white again - petals fell like a rain of peach skins on public suffering
Odoriferous mattresses of lilies and roses were laid out on the sidewalks to help cushion everything that felt too hard and crazy in those hours
You could get drunk on those smells, so strong-headed they were
They were shouting "F&#k" the terrorists" in their own way
With molecules - not ink
Around heaving shrines breathing in and out their sadness
Visitors stopped, paused, cried, stood there intensely silent, might snap pictures - and went, disappearing from view
There was so much movement and flux and reflux of people
That life was speeding by
And blurry was real
