NEWS
Do not cry for them. They
were only Syrians –
not Americans or French,
British or Dutch.
It’s just that 300 of them
died trying
to get from Libya to Italy in boats.
It was the eighth item on the
news,
after a piece on the stock
market
and word of league tables in
the English schools.
They were only Syrians after
all.
Interesting that exactly 300
of them drowned –
not two hundred and
ninety-eight, or
three hundred and four.
Exactly 300.
How very tidy. How tucked in
and neat.
That’s all we know. Not what
they did or where they came from;
not what they had to sell to
make the crossing,
or what they left behind in Syria ,
and all they carried with
them when they drowned.
Now they lie on the bed of
the Mediterranean
and I see them in my mind’s
eye, serene,
their struggle done at last.
Lying as if asleep,
the water softening their
wrists and faces.
Children lying tucked against
their mothers;
old men hollowed out, their
cheekbones hungry,
and all the little they had
left beside them
meaningless now and lost.
They will lie here until time
has wiped them out,
has softened them and they
have gone, these nameless ones.
But do not cry for them;
they’re only Syrians –
and there’ll be more, lots
more, before the war is over.
This is deliberately posted in the week we decide our future in Europe. It's sadly the case that xenophobic posters and rhetoric have been all too much in evidence from one side, at a time when the need to reach out to the suffering people of Syria could not be greater. Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of membership of the European Union, the crying shame of that suffering must be addressed.
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