We Are Here

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.