Frei

The boy’s ribs, birds’ beaks
peeking through skin like a cage.
His eyes are hunger, lips are salt,
and the ocean his mother music
breathing with him in cadences quick
and punishing.

Nearly a century ago he separated
from his mother forever, ill-fated
by syllables drawn from fooled lips,
“ARBEIT MACHT FREI”
We sentence you to die.

Now he rides on a wooden dream,
filled with others like him, sailing to a land
he knows only through fiction.
The boy thinks of Life of Pi,
how he must survive, how the only tiger
on board is synonymous with ‘future.’
His parents reassure him
all storms have sympathy
under the everwatchful sky.

Nearly a century ago messages of escape
bandaged Hope. They blossomed
like the tiny flowers which now blanket
rows and rows of bulldozed barracks,
drinking in the land’s history, changing blood,
bones, and memory into grounded stars.

Now the ocean fingers the little boat,
rocking it like a cradle, taunting.
The boy grabs onto glass dreams,
whispering, الأمور ليست سيئة كما تبدو.
The ocean is kinder than people.

Nearly a century ago he threw
wet blankets over electric fences.
Barbed wire, twisting and turning,
like the cage he wears for ribs.
As he hurled himself over the fence,
sirens cried like his brothers at night,
like the gasping ocean,
like the cold, distant sky.

Freiheit macht frei.