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| The full horror of the human tragedy unfolding on the shores of Europe was brought home on Wednesday as images of the lifeless body of a young boy – one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos – encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west. Turkish media identified the boy as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi and reported that his five-year-old brother had also met a similar death. Both had reportedly hailed from the northern Syrian town of Kobani, the site of fierce fighting between Islamic state insurgents and Kurdish forces earlier this year. —The Guardian, September 4, 2015 |
for Aylan
The bird, a murre, beaten by a wave,
its beak interred, its feathers caked with sand,
rolls in the foment of another wave.
No human word amounts to what has happened.
The bird is flowing back to the sky it gave.
Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.