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Refugees, A Love Story
Tim Barnes

They weren’t brother and sister.
They were refugees. They crossed a desert
and a sea. They walked for miles
in the sun and dust, the star-cut wind.

They ate insects and shat in the sand.
They loved no one together.
They lied they were married
to save her from the mercenaries.
They made up a story, a child.

If love is a lie, theirs was too
and it carried them through
the rocky country of the warlords
into the marsh lands around the sand lakes.

They both believed in a promise, a place
of peace, a haven like heaven, a story
refugees tell: when we get there, when
we get there…
and so they were found
on some strand of promised land
their bodies bound together
by the waves that wanted them.

—
Tim Barnes taught in the English Department at Portland Community College for twenty-five years, where he was the chair of the creative writing department and advisor on the literary magazine Alchemy. He is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Definitions for a Lost Language. He is co-editor of Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (OSU Press, 1997) and has edited Friends of William Stafford: A Journal & Newsletter for Poets & Poetry since 2011.

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Have you read these poems:
Refuge by Carol R. Sunde
The Hand of Aging Touches Some Gently by Zack Rogow

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