Made a Mural of Me
I have walked streets where the walls remember
better than the governments do.
I have stood beneath the painted faces
of the disappeared, the assassinated,
the catechists, the campesinos,
the students, the mothers,
the ones whose names were spoken once with terror
and now are spoken with flowers.
I have seen their eyes in plaster and pigment,
their halos done in cheap color,
their mouths half open as if the wall itself
were still trying to tell the story
of what was done to them.
In Central America,
I learned that a wall can become a gospel
when the newspapers lie.
A wall can become an archive
when the official files are burned,
when the generals call murder peace,
when the empire calls bloodshed stability,
when the poor are told to forget
for the sake of moving on.
But the wall does not move on.
The wall says: here.
The wall says: this happened.
The wall says: this child had a name.
This priest had hands.
This woman had laughter.
This union worker had a mother.
This martyr did not die in abstraction,
did not perish as an example,
did not vanish into a sermon illustration.
They were flesh.
They were breath.
They were somebody’s beloved.
And I have seen it elsewhere too.
Not only there, where memory was brushed onto concrete
beneath the long shadow of rifles and oligarchs,
but here,
in this empire’s marble reach,
in this capital of speeches and signatures,
in neighborhoods of D.C. where color rises up
against erasure,
where the dead look down from brick walls
and ask the living what exactly we are doing
with the testimony they left us.
I have walked those streets too,
where murals bloom like wounds that refuse to close,
where every face says both remember
and why again?
That is the ache of it.
Because a mural is beautiful,
but it is also an indictment.
A mural is what happens
when grief runs out of sanctioned places to go.
When cemeteries are too quiet,
when courtrooms are too compromised,
when history books are too polite,
when churches would rather canonize the dead
than stand beside the threatened living,
someone climbs a ladder with paint
and says:
You will not make us forget.
And yet even that holy act contains a heartbreak.
Because every new mural is also a confession
that we have failed again.
We say we honor the martyrs.
We paint them large.
We ring them with light.
We write their names in careful letters.
We tell their stories to our children.
We call them seeds.
We call them saints.
We call them witnesses.
But if we must keep making more walls,
if there is always another name,
another mother,
another child,
another prophet with blood on their shirt,
another journalist, another dreamer, another body,
then our memorials are not only songs of praise.
They are laments.
They are accusations.
They are unfinished prayers.
I do not want a world
where we become very skilled
at decorating the aftermath.
I do not want justice outsourced to artists
because legislators are cowards,
because police departments close ranks,
because borders harden,
because markets consume,
because nations baptize their violence
and then ask poets to clean up the silence.
I am grateful for the murals.
God, I am grateful for them.
For the ones who paint the saints with brown hands
and tired eyes.
For the ones who make a wall preach.
For the ones who turn an alley into a liturgy.
For the ones who refuse the second death,
the death of being forgotten.
But I am tired of needing them.
Tired of standing before another radiant face
and knowing radiance came at the price of a bullet.
Tired of admiring the colors
while knowing the color had to cover over grief
too large for speech.
Tired of telling the story again
because the engines that made the story
were never dismantled,
only rebranded, relocated, repainted.
That is the terrible genius of empire.
It learns to tolerate memorials
so long as the machinery of martyr-making stays intact.
Put the face on the wall.
Name the school after the slain.
Hold the vigil.
Light the candle.
Share the quote.
Then fund the weapons.
Protect the system.
Discredit the witness.
Fortify the border.
Ignore the neighborhood.
Silence the poor.
And when the next body falls,
commission another mural.
No.
There is something obscene
about praising the courage of the dead
while refusing the cost of solidarity with the living.
There is something blasphemous
about loving Romero on the wall
but not listening to prophets now.
About cherishing painted martyrs in San Salvador
and neglecting crucified people in Washington,
in detention centers,
in poor towns,
in Black and brown neighborhoods,
in places where the state still knows how to kneel
on a neck,
how to disappear a future,
how to call a human being illegal
before making them dead in spirit.
So yes,
I have walked among the murals.
And yes,
they have taught me.
They taught me that memory is resistance.
That color can be a form of defiance.
That beauty can tell the truth
when official language becomes a mask for murder.
They taught me the communion of saints
sometimes looks less like stained glass
and more like chipped paint on cinder block.
Less like cathedral windows
and more like public walls under open sky.
They taught me that the martyrs are still speaking.
Not only from heaven.
From brick.
From alley.
From barrio.
From the side of a building everyone passes
on the way to work,
on the way to school,
on the way to forgetting.
And they taught me to shudder.
Because sometimes, standing there,
I have had the strange and terrible thought:
One day they could make a mural of me.
Not because I seek glory.
Not because I imagine myself noble.
Not because I think suffering makes a person pure.
But because in a world like this,
where truth still threatens power,
where solidarity still has a price,
where loving the crucified too closely
can still get you crucified,
any one of us who dares enough
might end up as paint.
Made a mural of me.
Put me on a wall with the others.
Give me a background of sunburst gold,
or deep blue,
or the red of blood transfigured into witness.
Paint my face calmer than I ever was in life.
Smooth out my fear.
Make me look brave.
But if you do,
let the mural say I did not want this.
Let it say I wanted fewer murals,
not more.
Let it say I wanted children to know these names
without needing to inherit their wounds.
Let it say I wanted nations to repent
before artists had to remember for them.
Let it say I wanted churches
to become sanctuaries of the endangered
instead of galleries of the already slain.
Let it say I wanted the wall
to go blank someday,
not from amnesia,
but from justice.
That is my prayer now.
Not that we stop honoring the martyrs.
Never that.
Paint them.
Sing them.
Tell them.
Teach them.
Write them in the streets and on the doors
and in the marrow of the young.
But also:
stop making so many of them.
Let there come a day
when the painters have to find another subject.
When the ladders lean against walls
for festivals instead of funerals.
When color is used for delight
and not only for defiance.
When remembrance is no longer emergency labor.
When the living are protected enough
that martyrdom becomes rare,
and rare enough
that every new death shocks us again.
Until then,
the walls will keep preaching.
And I will keep listening
with gratitude and grief,
with reverence and anger,
with hope cracked open but not empty.
Because every mural is a promise
the dead make to the living:
We are still here.
We are watching what you do next.
Do not honor us
by becoming connoisseurs of tragedy.
Honor us
by ending the thing that killed us.
And until that day,
the paint will keep drying,
and the faces will keep multiplying,
and the walls will keep learning names
they should never have had to learn.
And I will stand before them,
heart broken open,
thinking:
this wall should be empty by now.
#CentralAmerica #Justice #Lament #Martyrs #memory #murals #peace #propheticWitness #ProsePoem #publicArt #solidarity #SpokenWord #WashingtonDC
Slow Mover
Christic Academy
Mark Davies
Rev. Eric Burrows-Stone ⳨