Wake Not Again

Kenneth Godoy sits with me and a few others around a small table every Friday, discussing the weighty subjects of Migration and Diaspora. He also happens to be one of my favorite poets and photographers. This poem is his. 

***

Who is responsible for the dead people

on the Aegean. The women from Syria

and Iraq. The dead people from Nigeria,

 

the dead children. The fathers, dead inside, who

recall those they left behind. Who is to blame

for them? Who claims the guilt of blood

 

spreading thick on the water, wide on the sea.

Who says, ” You are a migrant for my sake

for the sake of my god and my people.”

 

Who opens their arms to either welcome or

to admit. We should know by now that

people flow like water to places of least

 

resistance, yet what do they find at the ocean’s rim

and when do they arrive? Like waves

they come to a point, and break on the edge

 

again and again. Like waves, they never arrive

yet they come. Yet they come. And who is to

blame for them. Does war push them? Do mountains of

 

gold pull at them, like magnets, or like currents

pulling Aegean waves to the edge of the ocean

where they lay down and break in combers and often

 

wake not again.

***

Kenneth Godoy divides his time between Bedford, Pennsylvania, and Boston, Massachusetts, where he is a history major at Sattler College. As a child, his family moved between the Honduran and the American cultures, and he never quite knew to which people group he belonged—much like a migrant. Kenneth is the photographer for the Sattler College blog and publishes some of his poetry, as well as photography, in The Curator. For more of his writing, check out his blog, That Blinding Light.

The well-known scene at the top was photographed by Nilufer Demir on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, in 2015, catapulting the Syrian refugee crisis to international attention.