A Sea Prayer...

´I wish you hadn´t been so young.

You wouldn´t have forgotten the farm house,

the soot of its tone walls,

the creek where your uncles and I built

a thousand boyhood dreams´.

´But that life, that time,

seems like a dream now,

even to me,

like some long-dissolved rumour´.

Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini is an illustrated poem dedicated to all the father, mothers and children who tried to escape wars and famine and prosecution by taking the way of the sea towards the shores of the European freedom. The watercolour illustrations by Dan Williams are the perfect visual match, which outline the emotional environment and take the reader into a dream-like realm. This is how, mostly, our dreams appear to us, wrapped in the pastel-like unclear shapes. 

In few inspired words, Khaled Hosseini convenes the heartache of leaving one´s home, family and childhood memories, going to face the unknown where most probably their misfortune is never welcomed. Alone while craddled together in the boats taking them away be night, they pray but this is for soothing their souls. Fate has not always have been merciful to them.

This was the case of the 3yo Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, to whom and other thousands of refugees the book is dedicated to. In 2015, he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach safety. His story, widely mediatized was for a while a topic of international discussion, but it did not change tremendously the situation as many many other unknown victims were eaten alive by the sea while trying to escape the war-torned regions of the world. The Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini, the unforgettable storyteller of the Kite Runner, is an UNCHR Goodwill Ambassador. 

Sea Prayer is a moving tribute to the fate of those people who did not make it safely to the freedom shores and a mind-opener aimed to renember humans all over the world, but particularly in charge to deciding the fate of the refugees that they should be first and foremost empathic human beings.

Rating: 5 stars