Naomi Thiers
Refugee, 15
Fear is in your bread
and you must choke it down.
To think of home—
the courtyard with its red filigreed rug,
the peel-paint walls, how the breeze with its tang
of the Khabur River touched your just-cut hair
as you curled up, writing in your diary—
starts the rockslide of grief, the thundering
that blocks out sound, pulls
a knife across each breath until
you drag your body like a sack,
walking with others
toward the border.
But something rises up,
wants to live:
I won’t be that man sitting
on his burned porch, face a lace of cuts,
waiting in rain for death.
Shut away now the images of home,
like your diary with its leather straps.
Preserve your young life.
Eat your bread.
Naomi Thiers is the author of Only The Raw Hands Are Heaven (Washington Writers Pub House, 1992), In Yolo County (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and She Was a Cathedral (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Pacific Review, Potomac Review, Grist, and Sojourners, among other publications and anthologies. Originally from California, she lives in Washington, DC, and is an editor at Educational Leadership magazine.
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