Wearing his white T-shirt
embroidered with his dreams
he marches forward
toward his stolen village,
only 15 kilometers away.

At the border they made
he stands,
not allowed to cross,
to even place his feet on his own land.
At the border he is threatened
with death if he gets too close.

He keeps marching.
His wife wears the festive colors of their village,
from which their grandparents were expelled
so many years ago.

“Exile saps my spirit, but fear drains it more,” he says,
weary of being an endless refugee,
of endless surveillance by
warplanes, drones,
snipers with rubber-coated steel bullets,
live ammunition.

They keep marching against the fear,
the soldiers’ order to shoot to kill.
A man next to him falls;
wounded or killed?
The crowd lifts him up,
takes him away.

The man with the embroidered dreams keeps marching,
with his family and his unyielding comrades.
Each has a dream—both practical yet impossible.
enough food for the family,
clean water to drink or swim in,
land to own and live on,
light to read by,
a sky without watching eyes,
freedom to travel,
to worship at the place held most sacred.

Hundreds of guns
point at his beating heart.
They keep walking toward the land
grandparents called home.

They have no place else to go,
but the hovel where they will live
or die like the refugees they are,
waiting to return home,
their real home,
not this cage, this prison.

The sound of an ambulance fills the air,
shouts and cries.
Another life lost,
another dreamer gone.
Still, they march.