Salt crusted in the children’s eyelashes. Three days since the last of the water, and the sun kept at them, lifting blisters along every arm and neck bared to it. The boat rode low, packed hull to hull with bodies, and each wave that broke over the gunwale stayed.
They bailed with cupped hands, with a shoe, with a plastic jug sawed in half. The sea gave it all back.
A woman leaned out over the side and dragged her palm through the water, as if sweetness might have pooled somewhere in all that salt. Her children’s mouths had gone white at the corners. She tipped her face to the sky, and the sound that left her had no words in it at first, then found them: “Please, God. My babies. Save my babies.”
Her husband’s hand landed on her shoulder. “We’ll make it to Greece. Then we’ll be safe.” The lie sat strange in his mouth, and he swallowed against it.
The boat lurched. Tilted. Held a moment at an angle no boat should hold, and went over.
Cold clamped around them all at once, hundreds of throats opening into one sound. Some clawed onto planks, a fuel can, the halved jug. Most went down, and the sea smoothed itself over the place where they had been.
She surfaced with her arms empty.
“Where are they?” Turning, turning. “Where are my babies?”
Her husband shook his head. Water ran off his face, or it was the other thing. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
They found each other’s hands. Around them the sea lifted and lowered what it had taken, and the sky she had prayed into stayed the same blue it had been all along.
Author’s Note
Read my companion poem, Sea Worthy at Spillwords.
News reports state that over 500 migrants perished at sea near Greece while seeking a better life. I imagine the horror, the cries for help, mothers and fathers trying to save their children, their babies!
That numerous people will risk their lives to flee war, persecution, and poverty speaks volumes about the state of our world.
Mass migrations have many causes, including grinding poverty, limited economic opportunity, and lack of basic social supports, such as housing, education, public sanitation, and medical care; famine, hunger, pestilence, and disease; environmental damage brought on by climate change and natural disasters; war, violence, political instability and the social chaos that results. These causes are often interconnected and self-reinforcing. Complications aside, self interest in an era of global connectedness would seem to demand a response if human decency alone is not sufficient to prompt one.
Poets through the ages write about our interconnectedness, but the one quote that resonates with me is by John Donne, who was not only a poet but the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. In his most famous quote from a sermon he said (emphasis is my own):
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
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Frightening experience. I hope their souls are at peace now.
Thought provoking post, Caro. Maybe we can be that island, that haven in another's storm. Maybe we can be part of their future. Good words, Caro.