On Wings of Silence: Mexico ’68
Seventeen-year-old Diana Greene travels from Texas to Mexico City, searching for adventure, freedom, and romance. She finds all three. Then Diana’s first love Guillermo vanishes during the revolutionary chaos prior to the ’68 Olympics. Heartbroken, she searches for the truth about his disappearance. As police track, threaten, and abuse those who ask questions, she refuses to be silenced and risks becoming one of the missing.
Based on real events, On Wings of Silence: Mexico ’68 uses historical details from the Tlatelolco Massacre to enhance a story told through the fictional eyes of Diana.
Chapultepec Park: September 25, 1968
spread baskets of lilies, irises, sunflowers
fresh from the bud as the young woman
who gathers them in brown arms,
strolls through Chapultepec green,
dreams of a lover among the helado vendors,
peanut crunchers, pinwheel spinners, futbol players.
Overhead red and yellow balloons snare
running children in their dangling strings.
She follows a winding path to a sculpture garden
where sun-warmed statues embrace in a vacuum.
Like a shadow, silence fills the plaza. An absence of sound
pulls her from a flower-filled reverie.
Her eyes widen.
She catches her breath, darts through spiky bushes
to the broad Paseo de la Reforma, now still.
No rattling grimy cars, smoke-belching buses,
shawl-draped women
with bundles and babies.
Stiff-legged soldiers goosestep in tight rows,
rifles, bayonets, bazookas against their shoulders.
At road’s curve, tanks roll,
mechanical monsters, geared,
devour everything
in their path. She runs.
Her sandals slap the tender undersides of bare feet
as she weaves in and out of razor straight lines,
blank-faced soldiers, blinded by command.
Her heart
pounds like their boots.
Pursued by Rivera’s murals, Revolutions,
memories, mothers’ tales of uniformed rapes,
she tears across the avenue,
trailing ripped lilies, bruised irises,
crushed sunflowers.