“This is the dawn I had been waiting for

The first day, whole and clear

Where we emerge from night and silence

And, free, inhabit the substance of time”

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andersen, The Name of Things, 1974

For two weeks, our hands made red carnations out of crepe paper, a very beautiful, crinkled kind of paper.

I asked if I could make a rose or a tulip, but the teacher said it had to be a carnation, because on Freedom Day, April 25th, the soldiers who went out into the streets to overthrow the dictatorship and bring freedom to the people had red carnations in the barrels of their guns.