Chrifa Mohammed Salem, 6, pictured outside her home in Auserd refugee camp, Algeria
I go to school and then I come back and play with my sister. It is very hot, I want it to be cold. I want to be a teacher when I grow up.
There is no water here.
My daddy was an astronaut
That's what I was often taught
My daddy went away to soon
Now he's living on the moon
Hang on to me people we're going down
Down among the fishes in an absence of sound
It's the presence of distance and it's floating in time
It's lack and it's longing and it's not very kind
Sitting here scratching in this rented room
Scratching and atapping to the man in the moon
About all the things that I've been taught
My daddy was an astronaut
Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping,
Of February, in sobs and ink,
Write poems, while the slush in thunder
Is burning in the black of spring.
Through clanking wheels, through church bells ringing
A hired cab will take you where
The town has ended, where the showers
Are louder still than ink and tears.
Where rooks, like charred pears, from the branches
In thousands break away, and sweep
Into the melting snow, instilling
Dry sadness into eyes that weep.
Beneath - the earth is black in puddles,
The wind with croaking screeches throbs,
And-the more randomly, the surer
Poems are forming out of sobs.