Dedication: In Tribute to the Syrian Refugees. I read this poem at the annual event 100,000 Poets for Change in Doha, Qatar on 24 September 2016.

Exile in Middle Earth
By John Herlihy

Behold, my hearth, my home, my country, I live on Planet Earth;
I have happily resided here since the time of my birth.
I wished to live here always, from which I hope never to part;
My home is my country, it beats within me as a second heart.
Destiny has changed things and my life will never again be the same;
I have lost my hearth, home and country, in fact, I have lost my name.
Everything I knew to have value and all those things that I held dear
Has been reduced to rubble, just as our cities, and we now live in fear.
We have had to give up our way of life and any sense we had of style;
We roam now from place to place, venture across borders, in true exile.

Once I was a devoted doctor wearing shirts with designer tags;
Now I am a poor man and an exile reduced to wearing faded rags.
Once my life was a rainbow shining porcelain blues and flaming reds;
Now my life is a tapestry torn violently apart and reduced to shreds.
Once I had an extended family of parents, children, uncles and aunts;
Now the extended family is dead and gone, destroyed like weeded plants.
Once I could look to the future with hope and pride brimming in my eyes;
Now I wander aimlessly out of mind and out of place in a life I despise.
Once I turned to my son and said: when I am old, you will be a young man;
Now when I become old, I will give up the ghost and become the bogeyman.

This is the meaning of exile, we are now the sole inhabitants of Middle Earth;
I have journeyed across the sea of life having been set adrift by the ocean’s surf.
We refugees now swim in oceans of sorrow as bottomless as my mother’s eyes
We float in a river that murmurs regret as it flows across lands to our demise.
Like a motherless child, abandoned and lost and with nowhere to rightly turn;
I now find myself in the middle of nowhere as my final resting place to sojourn.
I turn to the Supreme Being whose mercy will lift me up and take me far away;
Lift me up on feathered wings, far beyond this middle earth where I now stay.
As the earth turns here below, I wish to soar with the eagles into the celestial sky;
Where I hope to find answers to my questions and finally discover the reason why.