Walking the Wall

I posted this poem a few years ago but the refrain was going through my mind in regards to Ishmael Beah’s autobiography A Long Way Gone so I thought I’d pull it out.

There was a point in his journey that he and a group of boys who were running away from the chaos and madness heard a noise like thunder exploding–they didn’t know what it was until they stood in front of the ocean for the first time in their lives. They smiled at the site, and the site took them away from the madness of life. They watched the waves rolling in and then bolted off like children, chasing and wrestling each other, doing somersaults and playing running games–”We shouted, laughed, and sang our secondary-school songs” (59). All activities that should have been common place for little boys–but which had become unreal in the chaos and horrors of war. For a moment they stepped into another realm: “To the waters and the wild / with a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping / than you can understand.”

The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

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I’ve always loved the haunting quality to this poem, but I never really connected with the meaning as much as I have after reading about Beah’s life and seeing him and the other boys as stolen children–lost boys, in reality. The inside flap of the book says that as of publishing there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers worldwide–we cannot afford to lose our children, it has to be stopped.