DEATH AT THE BEACH

This poem is inspired by the state of the world as it is today where children are the most vulnerable in an amphitheater of hate and terror.

**

There lies the beach,
with its monthly sand sculpture made by amateur fingertips
and grainy facepacks for toddlers screaming, ‘Mummy, look, it’s me’

The beach, always deep yellow and intensely brown with the day’s shade ,
was for a while also migrants’ transit parlour,
in which we all wore a different skin,
a mortal one
and received them for asylum, rest, compassion and peacetime summits,
mingling parenthood with the children’s just demands for playtime and assorted lunch breaks.

**

A Passage By Sea, today, is still born
as the boy from his ancestral Mediterranean village lies face down in the sand,
by the sea,
sunk, as of this date, into a Photo of the Year felicitation.
Last seen in a foetal position with head down.

His is a grim seafaring spirit,
birthed in a foreign tongue,
mother’s agonies and tearful kisses
and the father’s slurred speech and disbelief,
grim in the face of his watery graveyard here.

The Beach

The Child In The Water.

Seances of futile hope,
orchestrated by the Mediterranean for incoming boats and drifting birthdays.

**

For child is the father of man,
His mother’s river of despair
and to a far away Head of State,
a veritable State of the Union appendage,
a book’s liner note and for memory’s sake, a dried fig of a bookmark and endnote,
lost to the seagull’s traveling routes.

**
At the beach,
we chant, ‘absolve me of our sins’,
head down,
sand in our hands,
hardly praying and almost hopeless.
For our children have despaired and we are distant eye witnesses.

**

This poem simultaneously appears on my Wattpad poetry collection WORDS ON THE HORIZON.