Identity:

How will you know me,

Once my flesh has parted from my bone

Without my soft hips and freckled face

Without a name to answer to, or a voice to call out

What remains is the thin bend of my wrists

The protrusion of my rib bones

The splintered fracture lines on my arms from enthusiastic falls

The holes in my teeth carved by lifetime of sweet pies

And the metal that fills them

My hair no longer cascades, nor my eyes smile

But do not doubt that it is me

your sister, your daughter, your lover, your friend,

with my name on your lips

We are together in peace

From my kitchen window, over the clay roofs and full trees, I can see on the hill a cold white building.  It is the International Commission for Missing Persons Commemorative Center where the bodies of thousands of genocide victims go to be identified. I visited on a hot day this week, and was greeted by the unsterilized smell of unsatisfied death. In a large hot room the remains of thousands of nameless people lay, silent in the thick air. For 17 years they lay in shallow mass graves, being unearthed, separated, scattered and crunched. Their killers tried to silence their identity, bury their names and fates, but the truth always surfaces. Here, at the ICMP, the dedicated staff searches through the bones of the dead and the blood of the living to find the names, the faces and the families of the thousands of people who the world forgot.

Below is a video I put together about the process of identification, please be aware that there are images of human remains and straightforward descriptions of the handling of remains.