My Dear Friends:
"One out of every 69 people on Earth is now displaced.
That is about 120 million people, or 1.5 percent of the world's population, who have been uprooted from their homes.
Behind these numbers are countless human stories of families separated, livelihoods lost and communities shattered.
Sixty-eight million of those are internally displaced within their own countries. The rest are refugees in need of protection (43.4 million) and people who are seeking asylum (6.9 million), according to the annual displacement report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) .
To raise awareness about the situation of refugees worldwide, the UN designated June 20 each year as World Refugee Day" (Al Jazeera, June 20: The faces behind the numbers)
The following is a set of haiku and tanka selected for your reflections on World Refugee Day, 2024 whose theme is "Solidarity with Refugees."
caressing waves --
in the refugee boat
unborn child
Nicole Pottier
refugee convoy --
a newborn baby smiles
in his sleep
Lavana Kray
a child refugee rides
on his father's shoulders ...
rainbow bubbles
Chen-ou Liu
douane --
in the eyes of a refugee
the borderless sky
Dan Iulian
when the sun sinks low
refugees' shadows conglobulate
over the wired border ...
a tender lullaby
softens the wind
Lavana Kray
To conclude today's special feature post, I would like to share with the following tanka about one of ongoing armed conflicts, which has been displacing many people within their own country.
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, LXX: "Rafah's skies"
written in response to Issa's "good world" haiku:
rolling off
the tip of a blade of grass
dewdrop
after dewdrop
from Rafah's skies
FYI: Issa's good world haiku below is quoted as the first stanza of "Reading the Japanese Poet Issa (1762–1826)," a free verse poem functioning like a poetic commentary, where three of Issa's haiku are included, written by Polish-American poet and 1980 Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz, whose view of haiku is: Haiku is extra-literary.
A good world --
dew drops fall
by ones, by twos
Issa
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