Far from the forests he knew
and the country he’d fled,
where the earth was red
and the houses round
with conical tops and

daub-and-wattle walls,
he found a refuge:
this scruffy wood,
a secondary forest
on the suburban edge.

Homeless, unemployed, bereft
of even his car to sleep in, he
squatted in an abandoned shack:
four walls, a roof and a door,
but no windows—his shelter

and his prison.  In a shallow,
polluted creek he washed
his hands and face, anxiously
raising his head. But no one came
to rob him or even to talk.

He made friends with a spider
and came to know the fallen
trees, the dark gray rocks
at the edge of the stream
and the pale morning light

creeping under the door,
waking him from
unremembered dreams
that had something to do
with the home he had lost.

He could not forget the civil war,
the families fleeing into the forest.
He remembered the children
by the side of the highway,
wanting desperately to beg

from passing drivers, but
too traumatized to put out
their hands; perhaps they’d
been forced to kill their fathers
and rape their mothers.

But this wood is in another world,
an easier world to bear, though
it, too, is hard to live in alone,
without family, friends or money,
a clean shirt and socks or a tie.

Early in the morning
he would leave the woods
and look for work that paid
enough to buy three meals;
but this was not the work

he’d trained and lived for.
At home he’d been a teacher
—here he was just another
unemployed, homeless man
with dark skin and dirty clothes.

But one spring day he left the shack
and found help, a room with windows
and work on a farm in the country.
It still wasn’t what he had come
to the promised land to find.

Now he has to relearn the language
of expectation, the words he
forgot in that shack in the woods,
the simple sounds of a life he
never again can call “normal.”

Linda Rabben is an anthropologist (PhD Cornell) with field experience in Brazil, England and the United States, an author and a human rights activist. Her sixth book, Give Refuge to the Stranger: The Past, Present and Future of Sanctuary, was published in 2011.