NOBODY LEAVES HOME UNLESS

[pillars]

NO ONE LEAVES HOME UNLESS - - From the Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire. Shire. (born August 1, 1988) is a London–based poet, editor and teacher, who emigrated to the United Kingdom at the age of one.

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
******* with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

 

[waltky]

Still a minuscule number of Christian refugees...

Administration Nears Syrian Refugee Goal: 9,077 Muslims; 47 Christians
August 22, 2016 – With less than six weeks of the fiscal year to go, the Obama administration is speeding towards meeting its target of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States, and is currently fewer than 900 refugees away from the goal.

A total of 9,144 Syrian refugees have now been resettled in FY 2016. Of these, 9,077 are Muslims. Among the 9,144 refugees, 47 (0.5 percent) are Christians and 14 (0.15 percent) are Yazidis--like Christians, a non-Muslim minority targeted specifically by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) for persecution. Meanwhile the administration has admitted 8,984 Sunni Muslims – 98.2 percent of the total number admitted this fiscal year – according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data.

Syrian refugees at Amman airport in Jordan​

The remaining refugees resettled since October 1 last year are 20 Shi’a Muslims, 73 other Muslims, five refugees identified as “other religion,” and one as having “no religion.” Admissions for August follow a similar pattern: Of a total of 1,593, 12 (0.75 percent) are Christians, 1,552 (97.4 percent) are Sunnis. Another 23 are other Muslims, four are Yazidis, and two are adherents of “other religion.” The 12 Christians admitted so far this month comprise four Protestants, four Orthodox, one Catholic, and three refugees described simply as “Christian.”

The denominational breakdown for the 47 Christians admitted in FY 2016 is seven Catholic, six Orthodox, four Protestant, one Greek Orthodox and 29 “Christian” refugees. Since 2011 millions of Syrians of all religious and ethnic backgrounds have fled the civil war, whose antagonists include ISIS, al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and other Sunni Salafist groups, moderate/nationalist Sunni rebels, Kurds, Shi’a Iran and its Hezbollah ally, other Shi’a militia, and the Assad regime, dominated by the Shi’ite Allawite sect.

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