The Lost Boy

Anushka Sisodia

He is silent,
And in his silence he is sad
His thoughts a mournful despair,
yearning for the sweet warmth of things that love.

But home is a severed image
And the thought of that love is bizarre -
Fantastical, fictional, and jarring against this new expanse.

Where he is tugged at from a thousand other angles
Embraced by the hood of cold disbelief
humming to the sound of the broken hearts and bones.

And his body screams for liberty, screams of loss
Noises felt by all, heard by none.
And when he cries, he cries quietly
Haunted by the towering villain inside his mind.

But when he dreams -
He allows himself to glide past this realm.
Past the rubble, past the confusion, past the alien expanse
Oblivious to the ache in his thought.

Here he comes when he rests
Here, where they skip on the streets in drowsy sunsets
Here, where the seas by the shore are innocent
Here, where the gentle warmth of nature is benign.

And he finds his home
amongst the fractured dreams and promises
He finds his solace
Of friends and smiles and happy things

He is blessed.
And his mother is glad when his eyes are closed
For when he is asleep,
he is a child
once more.

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On ‘The Lost Boy’

This poem is an acknowledgement of people who have been displaced and whose lives have been torn apart by extreme weather events. Leaning on the stories of those who survived Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines in 2018, it seeks to reflect the world through the eyes of child after his home was destroyed by the storm, and the spaces he once believed to be safe and familiar were distorted into battered landscapes of confusion and loss.

This poem was first published as part of LSESU Amnesty International Society’s annual human rights journal ‘A Climate of Change’.

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