Three Poems published in DoveTales: Refugees and the Displaced
 |
| Photo from New York Times |
In the editorial to this DoveTales collection that focuses on refugees and the displaced, Carmel Mawle, wrote:
We chose “Refugees and the Displaced” as our theme for
this issue of DoveTales, because their suffering is in the front
of our collective consciousness. This was reflected in the world
wide coverage of families detained at our borders, tent cities full
of devastated refugees, perilously overcrowded rafts, and the
heartbreaking of Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a Turkish beach.
The entries that flooded in from our Young Writers Contest
Revealed similar awareness and concern for the growing crisis of
Displaced people. Now, nearly a year later, the situation for asylum
Seekers, refugees and, and it seems, all those in need of a helping
Hand, has reached new levels of hostility and danger.”
DoveTales:Refugees and the Displaced: An International Journal of the Arts.
www.writingforpeace.org.
Below are my contributions to DoveTale. I am one voice, among many, appealing to those who create conditions for displacement, and no longer feel as fellow humans do, and those, who pretend to be deaf to the plight of fellow humans. Listen. Read. Love.
 |
| Art work, Mark Henson |
Going Where the Roof is Vast
They go where their bare feet take them,
beyond the scorn and condemnation
of those who have burned their homes and crops
in the name of Allah and Christ.
They will dig up the bones of their ancestors
and go beyond trees blanketed by dust,
beyond washed out roads,
manned by those who constrain
their lives.
Let them get away from
eyes that lynch them,
words that strip them of dignity,
and scorn them as a godless tribe.
Unconquered by foreign Gods,
they seek sanctuary within their borders
seek peace in the deep forest
where they can hear gods
speaking in the whisper of trees
and the gurgle of running rivers.
Let them go where
sun, moon and wind guide the universe,
Let them go where
they can read the messages in the sky at night.
“Heathens” and resistant to alien beliefs,
filled with the spirit of the driver ant,
they will find a home where the roof is vast.
© Althea Romeo-Mark 12.12.16
*A tribute to animism- the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena. Animism is the oldest known type of belief system in the world.
 |
| Althea Romeo-Mark, Grenada |
 |
| Hatian refugees, Guantanamo Public Memory |
If We Could Buy a Miracle
(for Haitians, Cubans, North Africans, Syrians and all people who have lost their lives seeking freedom)
Hope lies on another
Caribbean island, the US mainland.
Hope lies across the Atlantic Ocean,
across the Mediterranean Sea.
We put our fate in the stars,
the juju man,* the obeah man,* Al Sulaba,*
place our future in the hands of strangers
who promise to deliver on our dreams.
If we could buy a miracle,
we would walk on water
but we bought a dream
with savings we slaved for.
We do not wish to look back.
Behind us only debris,
famine, war and death.
There is no fortune
in land that is dust,
in a city that lies in rubble.
We do not have a Moses to guide us,
to divide the sea, the ocean
and give us passage.
If we could buy a miracle…
© Althea Romeo-Mark 02.10. 16
Notes
1. JuJu is a spiritual belief system incorporating objects, such as amulets, and spells used in religious practice, as part of witchcraft in West Africa. The term has been applied to traditional West African religions. Good juju can stem from almost any good deed; bad juju can be spread just as easily. These ideas revolve around the luck and fortune portions of juju.
2. Obeah (sometimes spelled Obi, Obea, or Obia) is a term used in the West Indies to refer to folk magic, sorcery, and religious practices developed among West African slaves, specifically of Igbo origin.
3. Among the nomadic tribes of the Arab Peninsula is a peculiar tribe who are the most knowledgeable of the Peninsula's deserts, oases, wadis, hills, and mountains, as well as its animals and plants. This tribe, called Al Sulaba, are the most widespread in those parts, and the most capable of crossing those arid plains. Some Bedouins call them Al Sulban(meaning the crosses) or Al-Khlawiyah (a name derived from khala, meaning wilderness, implying a comparison to pariah dogs).
 |
| Syrian Refugees, Daily Mirror |
What Poseidon Tosses Up
I
Poseidon is angry.
His long flowing beard,
like tentacles of seaweed,
floats and rolls the moment he turns and tosses,
the earth shudders.
He hurls up what’s foreign to his domain—
the indigestible, unpalatable,
ancient shipwrecks on his seabed,
age-old bones of dead slaves dumped
during trans-Atlantic journeys,
victims of cut-throat piracy,
sea-farers swallowed in storms.
On a day when Poseidon’s splashes too strongly,
tidal waves race to shore, schools of fish drift off paths,
whales are stranded, jelly fish, broken corals,
dead fish and the recently drowned
are heaved onto beaches.
II
Today Poseidon spat out another dead child,
a child washed up like drift-wood,
one whose parents sought a haven.
This story is the headlines of papers
selling the helplessness of the unwanted.
The news, the spoiler of meals and
the birth of sinking what can we do feelings
about the tales of today’s lepers.
Our new-day untouchables,
those not trapped in colonies of tents,
those who have sold all but their souls.
They are sent off in decrepit dinghies by traffickers
and caught in Poseidon’s choleric rage.
He is a god. What does he care about mere mortals.
The drowned child washed to shore.
It is the end of a dare-devil journey,
the end of a ride on the waves of hope and fear.
Althea Romeo-Mark 15.09.16.
 |
| New York Daily News |
Those Who Do Not Inherit the Earth
Land, seed roasted in heat,
covered in carcasses,
dirt slips through fingers,
blows a brown, blinding storm.
Land, drenched in blood,
spilled over coveted power
and its corrupting spoils,
is soaked in flood of tears.
Casualties of unpredictable nature,
dubious religions, divisive race' and class,
our brethren become the sheltered desperate
settled into tented camps of permanent despair.
Relieved, we do not walk in their shoes,
grateful we do not live in their hell,
we look on as their dreams are crushed.
© Althea Romeo-Mark 18.04.2015,
The word is mightier than a sword.
OOOOhhhhh Althea, the pain! what can we do? It makes me shudder to look at some of the photographs of the men, women and children so lost and haggard - refugees - people ho had and who have lost everything or those who never had trying to make a life somewhere else in ordeer to have. t is even too difficult to look at the photos and the faces because their pain is tangible and we can do so little except to pray. Please continue to write.
ReplyDeleteImpressive and touching. Thanks for posting.
ReplyDeleteWow! Keep 'em coming. Powerful work.
ReplyDelete