A decade’s unreported anarchy brings blood and dust, charted in numberless rusted cells where violence tells and torture proves.
They flee across the desert by truck, in the hands and debt of gangs, to make border disappearances.
In Libya and Yemen the smuggled bodies pay for thieved papers with degraded favours. Honours are all lost.
In the sea is the promise of every era’s castaways: souls strewn on the dark silent waves, squinting for island havens.
A small craft is a black dot in the indigo deep, the sun only a fire, a boat just another raft for the medusa.
MW Bewick 