The big waves
roll over.
The sea is black blood
and unforgiving
but lost in the flood
we are still living.
Each minute erodes the memory of bread,
congeals in the two-week-waterless veins;
the waves have drawn down the remains
of our hope to the depths, a lineless lead.
I was inspired by a single phrase in Neil Gaiman’s story to write a piece about the ‘left-to-die’ boat - a boatload of 72 refugees who fled Africa in March 2011, only to become adrift in the Mediterranean. despite several encounters with other vessels including - reportedly - a NATO warship, all but nine of the boat’s occupants died of starvation and thirst. The phrase I lit upon, “they are the ones who live, each day, in the wreckage of their dream”, seemed to encapsulate the incident, touching upon both the refugees’ broken vessel and their failed dreams of escape to Europe.