Sea of Return

(Dedicated to the unknown migrants who lost their lives at sea before reaching Lampedusa)

 

They come from lands once mapped in foreign tongues,

where borders were drawn with rulers and guns,

where gold and oil and even breath were taken

until the earth answered to a borrowed name.

 

The sea remembers what the maps forget.

Lampedusa glows like a promise at night,

a trembling light at Europe’s edge,

while the water counts what the world will not.

Thousands vanish between wave and wave—

numbers thinned, misplaced by tides and paperwork.

 

Hands know the truth of absence:

no ledger can hold the weight

of a missing child.

A boat bends, flips, breaks—

a coffin without walls.

Hundreds sink into the hull of history,

bodies pressed together

as if closeness might still become land.

 

They are called migrants,

as if motion were the crime,

as if hunger rose on its own,

as if homes were not emptied

long before the water was reached.

They come from former colonies—

soil stripped bare, wealth shipped outward,

futures delayed by centuries of extraction.

 

Now the sea collects interest in flesh.

Lampedusa stands, a stone between continents,

while the Mediterranean—once a bridge— relearns how to be a grave.

Call these deaths accidents if you must, but the waves refuse the lie.

 

This is history finishing its sentence,

each drowning a footnote written in salt.

And still they come,

because life insists,

because hope floats even when boats do not,

because returning wealth is harder than returning bodies to the sea.

 

Do not light candles.

Name the system.

Dismantle it.

Or the sea will keep writing

this policy in bodies.