I will share with you now some poems.
This is a galley, and it will be published on March 10.
I'm very sorry it's not here tonight.
It's not published yet.
They don't have any copies.
I asked them if, just for Arizona,
they could send a few boxes.
And they said we don't have them yet, so--
This is called, In the Lateness of The World,
and I want to share a few poems from it.
I've spent about seven years, seven of the past summers,
in Greece, on an island in the northern Aegean.
It's very near Lesbos, where the refugee camps are.
The people who are fleeing our wars and people
coming from North Africa through the Aegean,
trying to reach Europe, often die in the Aegean.
And the Greeks would go out on their little fishing boats
and try to save as many people as they could,
and bring them on to the beaches and take them
into their houses.
This became illegal.
They outlawed helping refugees.
The Greeks didn't care.
The Greeks don't care about laws like that,
so they kept doing it.
And I later met one of the refugees.
He's from the city of Homs in Syria.
This is his testimony, brought into a poem.
"The Boatman."
We were 31 souls, he said.
In the gray sick of sea, in a cold rubber boat, rising
and falling in our filth.
By morning, this didn't matter.
No land was in sight.
All were soaked to the bone, living and dead.
We could still float, we said, from war to war.
What lay behind us, but ruins of stone, piled on ruins of stone?
City called "mother of the poor,"
surrounded by fields of cotton and millet, city of jewelers
and cloak makers, with the oldest church in Christendom
and the Sword of Allah.
If anyone remains there now, he assures,
they would be utterly alone.
There is a hotel named for it in Rome,
200 meters from the Piazza di Spagna,
where you can have breakfast under the portraits of film
stars.
There, the staff cannot do enough for you.
But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night we
fetched a child, not ours, from the sea,
drifting face-down in a life vest, its eyes taken
by fish or the birds above us.
After that, Aleppo went up in smoke,
and Raqqa came under a reign of leaflets
warning everyone to go.
Leave, yes, but go where?
We lived through the Americans and Russians,
through Americans again, many nights
of death from the clouds.
Mornings surprised to be waking from the sleep of death, still
unburied and alive, with no safe place.
Leave, yes.
We'll obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea, to be eaten?
To the shores of Europe, to be caged?
To camp misery, and camp remain here?
I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet.
If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now, the boatman, driving a taxi
at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend.
I will get you there.