The Syrian
The father watches stone-faced, as his ten-year-old daughter weeps, remembering the children who froze in the refugee camp. He looks at her. He tries but is impotent to assuage her grief. He tells the camera she is too young to handle these tragedies. My heart swells with compassion, but not for the weeping child. For she knows the truth of her sorrow. I feel for the father, because we are brothers, hardened by the same fire we would call manhood. I recognize his kind and vulnerable heart. It beats beneath the steel and stone. He weeps for the innocent and for the horrors he has seen, through the tears of his little girl.
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