Government overthrown,
No work,
No bread or oil or
sugar in the shop.
Water is rationed
Darkness presides over
daylight
School no longer
educates our children.
We must escape,
Escape death,
Seek life.
Fear and sweat and
terror
(Violence)
Leaving home when darkness falls
We walk and ache and
walk still
the unknown.
Taken onto a truck and
dropped at the border.
We arrive at a place
more tormenting than our own,
Rotted flesh,
And waste,
Where are we?
Who are we?
They ask.
No papers, no names,
We wait.
We wait another five
years,
More children with no
School to go to.
Given flour, sugar and
oil,
Enough to keep from
dying.
I think of family left
behind,
Landscape hot and
dusty.
Lined, weathered faces
Peer at us from under cloaks.
Alone with my dreams,
My fears,
Alone again when we
are summoned to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees)
Still nowhere to take
us all.
We are leaving this
reviled place where people die
Without a name,
Without
a home.
We are going to find
Freedom,
We are.
Freedom will erase our
memories of fear
drought
hunger
death.
Freedom will save us.
Where do we arrive?
Another alien place
Stranger than the
first,
Barbed wire surrounds us
Opening, closing of
doors,
Women crying, children screaming
Guards call numbers
out
The clanging of keys
We must escape from
here
But how,
It is harder
No one knows we’re
here.
