Sunday 19 June 2016

News


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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