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.