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"Refugee"

by Willow Firesong

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Two years old.

"Take my hand, darling, stay close."
"Say goodbye to our house - can you wave?"
"Do we have everything?"
"We better. It's time to go."
"Did we forget anything?"

No.

We can never forget.

The memories drip, like the droplets of a torturer upon our foreheads.

It doesn't matter which country,
which reason,
which refuge.

All that matters is the choice -
leave or die.

The unknown, or a death that everyone around us assured us was not certain -
But they are all gone now,
Those who sought to believe,
To placate,
To remain.

They are lost to time, to distance, and too often, to death.

I wish I could have saved them.
They were my friends, my neighbors -
My family.

And now they are gone.

It wasn't always like that.
My home was once a place -
Instead of, as it is now,
A person,
A bed,
A roof to keep the rain off,
A few mementos of the time before,
When we truly had a place in the world,
A place that we called home.

They took our home.

They took our country.

They took our birthplace,
And we walked away
From everything -
Everything we'd ever known,
Everything we'd ever owned,
Everything we'd ever earned,
Everything we'd ever believed in.

We walked away,
Turned one last time -
Too stunned to feel rushed,
Or, indeed, to feel much of anything.
Whatever it was, it was gone now,
For we were gone,
Although we could be seen
And heard
We could no longer be touched -
Our lives here were over.

But then, they were over anyway,
From the day we learned the truth,
That our country had no place for our reality,
And we must leave
Or die.

And so we turned,
Not crying,
Our faces frozen in exhausted silence,
Stepped into the waiting vehicle,
And were taken to the point of our final departure.

Like shadows we passed through the city,
No longer tangible to those within,
An interruption of the light,
Cast by the contents of the world which now rejected us
Like a foreign organism
Which must be purged, or killed, or put the host at risk
By its very foreign nature.

When we were isolated,
Defined as different,
As "other",
When we stopped being
Part of the life of our community,
When we became foreign,
Then it was that our fate was sealed.
Until then, we were just another variation in the mix,
One more ingredient in a rich stew of mingled cultures,
Different lives;
But then
When times were hard
A way out was needed,
And we were deemed
Expendable.

And still we spent ourselves,
Pouring our lives into our community,
Our family,
Our homeland,
Our home.
And then, when we were spent,
It turned on us,
Turned our desire to continue serving into selfishness,
Our plea for life into perfidy,
And then into persecution -
But it was we who were to be persecuted,
We who were blamed for disruption,
We who were blamed for the deaths of our friends,
The sickness of our community,
The death of our collective dreams.

Our existence was anathema.

But you were so little,
How could I explain
All this?

What could you know, beyond the fact
That Mommy made you choose among your toys,
Among your clothes,
Among your books -
Or that you were too young to choose,
Or that there was no time -
And that all that you had ever known
Vanished one frozen day,
When we turned the world upside down,
And took you with us.

You had family, friends, and neighbors,
You had patterns and familiarity,
Security -
Home.

And one day,
We walked away,
And left it.

All.

Forever.

I looked down into your trusting eyes,
And asked myself
"Am I doing the right thing?"
And then I looked into the mirror,
And looking back, I saw
Your mother, green and grey and pale,
Hoping for a life denied her.
Without this move, there would be no life together,
There would be no life alone -
There would be no life
At all
For any of us.

If we were wrong,
We were disrupting your life for nothing.
But we were not wrong.
And daily, death walked closer.

I was pregnant with you,
That sunny summer's day
When the knock came
At our front door,
And I opened it to uniforms.
I had no right to keep them out -
Such rights were for our neighbors, not for us,
The law said so,
In the place we once called home.

They came,
And they looked,
And they spoke to their superiors,
And they went away again.
And with them they took our hope,
Our safety,
Our security,
Our books,
Our papers,
And despite the slew of rights
The law had taken from us,
And given to the men in uniform,
They still took more,
The letter of the law no bar,
For its spirit said,
Quite simply,
That all the rights were theirs,
And none were ours.

And from that day we fought the harder,
Seeking a way out.

We watched the rights we thought inalienable
All stripped away,
One by one,
Some excuse provided to placate those few among the masses who still cared.
Our rights were deemed unnecessary luxuries
By those whom might gave rights -
Apparently by taking them from us.

We watched as religious enclaves were burned down,
In your father's home town,
My home region,
First by the townsfolk,
As the authorities did nothing -
And then by the authorities themselves,
Acting in their official capacity
To rid the land of the scourge of difference.

To separate the sheep from the goats,
They labeled us,
Tagged us with our difference,
But we knew the role from days of old of goats,
At such a time,
And did not wish to wait for them to paint our blood upon their doors
To spare their families,
Within,
The vengeance of the powers they believed in.

All wrongs that happened we watched
Laid upon the nameless faceless
"THEM"
By "US" -
But we were "THEM",
They said so;
And so there was no place for us in "US",
And we must leave or die.

Their trains may run on time -
As long as they still run
Away,
And I am free to board them...

...Or free, at least, to send you off to freedom
And such safety as is left.

When did it become safer to send your children alone
Into the unknown?

Then again,
I think it would be safer
To hurl them off a cliff
Into seething ocean surges
Torn to lashing, foaming whips
By jagged rocks,
Than to let them or us remain
In the place we once called
Home.

And so I will find boxes,
Pack what little we can carry
- Or send ahead, if we are lucky -
And hope to find a box
In which to put the heart
I cannot afford
To bear within my chest,
Lest it should anchor me,
And risk or hinder flight,
By its deep attachment to our home.
I will tear it out -
Uproot this tie to place and people
And the life that we have known -
And cauterize the bleeding hole
With the burning resolve
That you shall live
In freedom, and in safety -
Even if I have to build them out of nothing,
Brick by brick,
With bleeding hands,
In a desert no one wants.

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Last updated on January 21, 1999