In July, I went to work with refugees who were currently staying in a camp on the island of Lesvos, Greece. We spent a week training volunteers around compassion fatigue as well as counseling those in the camp, both teaching coping skills as well as processing seemingly only a little of the trauma they had experienced. After returning, this image has remained in my memory.

—

“Bebe, those sleepy seeds are still in your eyes.”

He has been

Dreaming

It is all he can do

after waking up in this

place on the dusty

hill, barbed wire fenced in safe

and yet still stuck

in this holding cell, this

waiting

room, for a future he knows so little of.

They huddled in, chilled, as they crossed

with nothing but a few clothes stuffed

between legs, their raft slowly rocking

through that birthing canal,

hoping to make it alive across

the icy waves below. Yes,

he wakes here now,

Dreaming,

day after day, to leave this

place. Dreaming

is all he can do;

these tiny seeds of hope

keep him alive.