MarieClaire U.K.
Image credit AFP Via Getty Images
Imagine this:
you wake up one morning and you're at war.
You are told you have hours to flee
before the bombs come. You grab your baby, your toddler,
a cloth bag of what's at hand.
It will never be enough to meet the need.
The toddler is too young to toddle far
and you can only carry one.
What to do?
you wake up one morning and you're at war.
You are told you have hours to flee
before the bombs come. You grab your baby, your toddler,
a cloth bag of what's at hand.
It will never be enough to meet the need.
The toddler is too young to toddle far
and you can only carry one.
What to do?
They tell you to head south.
You follow the others but word comes back:
the border is closed.
Terror. Despair.
You long to wake from this nightmare.
It is too much.
You cannot possibly cope.
You follow the others but word comes back:
the border is closed.
Terror. Despair.
You long to wake from this nightmare.
It is too much.
You cannot possibly cope.
Yet somehow you put one foot in front
of the other.
You long to live, and for your children
to live, even in a world so cruel,
where half of the dead and dying
are children,
where a little girl weeps into the camera:
how are we supposed to live?
of the other.
You long to live, and for your children
to live, even in a world so cruel,
where half of the dead and dying
are children,
where a little girl weeps into the camera:
how are we supposed to live?
You keep moving, even though
the U.N. says
there is no safe place.
the U.N. says
there is no safe place.
I can't imagine a more desperate crossing
than the ones facing those fleeing
this latest war.
than the ones facing those fleeing
this latest war.
for Brendan at Desperate Poets where we are contemplating Desperate Crossings.
Desperate crossings like these we've endured since before Moses in the wilderness, but the sense of abandonment and dread feels fresh every time. Climate migrant must surely feel the same ... as the Israeli families playing dead as the bullets crossed over. Thanks for joining in the challenge, crickets getting louder at DP.
ReplyDeleteThe humane in human appears occasionally only to vanish. There's no place to run when we blast one another away from our only home.
ReplyDeleteMy heart aches/breaks for those human beings forced to flee every single thing they know, cherish. Your poetry captures this accurately/sadly/overwhelmingly.
ReplyDeleteSad, especially if the woman happened not to have been married to Hamas trash. It's not surprising that Muslim loyalty does not extend to Hamas collaborators. It's sad that the collectivist thinking that enables war never asks whether this woman and her children *were* collaborators.
ReplyDeleteYou paint a stark picture here, Sherry, but one I am afraid is all too true. There are no words profound enough to equal the stupidity and cruelty of deliberate war, only tears and blood to express the sad reality of hate made manifest.
ReplyDeleteThe pain in this latest war is almost insurmountable. So many human tragedies brought about by old men and their old feuds and hatreds.
ReplyDeleteSometimes Sherry, what is happening in the world is so appaling that if you are a poet/writer there really is no other subject. You have tackled this head on with humanity , sincerity and urgency.
ReplyDeleteSomebody I know said that there were some things that poetry could not do justice to but I think the opposite is true, newsreel only numbs with repetition but a poem such as this one distils and draws out the essence of the tragedy Sherry.
ReplyDelete