The seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water has had a potent effect on humans who are not physically able to survive, unprotected, in this liquid environment. Throughout the ages, the sea has lured adventurers, dreamers, fishermen, wealthy travelers, and slave traders. Even today, there are people of Southeast Asia who spend most of their lives on the ocean, nomads of the sea. Jane Yolen, a master of children’s literature, contributes two contrasting poems about the Jews who tried to escape the holocaust with an ocean journey that starts out full of hope but never reaches a safe haven because so many countries closed their ports to them. Escape from tyranny and the severing of family connections is chronicled in “Carried on Swaying Waves of Hope” as many Cuban refugees braved the 90 miles to Florida in the 1980s and is echoed in a poem about the 2014 Mediterranean refugee crisis.

Source: Huffington Post November 24, 2017 20:26 UTC