Sea Prayer – Khaled Hosseini

Sea Prayer – Khaled Hosseini

Sea Prayer – Khaled Hosseini

 

On a moonlit beach a father cradles his sleeping son as they wait for dawn to break and a boat to arrive. He speaks to his boy of the long summers of his childhood, recalling his grandfather’s house in Syria, the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, the bleating of his grandmother’s goat, the clanking of her cooking pots. And he remembers, too, the bustling city of Homs with its crowded lanes, its mosque and grand souk, in the days before the sky spat bombs and they had to flee.
When the sun rises they and those around them will gather their possessions and embark on a perilous sea journey in search of a new home.

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 safety in Europe in September 2015.

In the year after Alan’s death 4,176 others died or went missing attempting similar journeys.

“My dear Marwan, I look at your profile in the glow of this moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. And I say to you, “Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.”

Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are a flyspeck in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, are a precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshalla.”