I said to you,"Hold my hand.Nothing bad will happen."These are only words.A father's tricks,It slays your father,your faith in him.Because all I can think tonight ishow deep the sea,and how vast, how indifferent.How powerless I am to protect you from it.All I can do is pray.

You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole.You have learneddark blood is better newsthan bright.

But that life, that time,seems like a dream now,even to me,like some long-dissolved rumor.First came the protests.Then the siege.The skies spitting bombs.Starvation.Burials.These are the things you know.

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015.In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.

I have heard it said we are the uninvited.We are the unwelcome.We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice,over the tide.and she whispers in my ear,"Oh, but if they saw, my darling.Even half of what you have.If only they saw.They would say kinder things, surely.