ON THE RUN Poem by Stefan Hertmans

He had a hand
That pointed to the horizon.
The other was not there.

His mother, once a myth of spring,
The trembling of her lower lip,
The pain that wandered through the heat,
And how it was on the waves.

He still remembers how the light went under,
How everything in his body died
And that he then

Had that hand again, another
Which refused what he didn't have,
Something they never gave
Though they held it out to him.

He spoke of black horizons,
A world with no way in,
Tear gas and dead children,
Barbed wire in his own mind.
No one promising anything.