Most of us can’t imagine what it’s like to be a refugee. To pack up what’s left of your family, grab only the essential belongings that you can carry and get in the back of a truck, or a boat, a bike, a stroller or even just walk – for miles, for days – and not even know where you’re going. Just knowing that where you are isn’t safe. That any option is better than staying where you are.

Save the Children, an international children’s charity based in the UK, put together the above video with Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s not only a cry for donations, but also features a charity single for the refugee crisis – a re-issue of the Crowded House song Help Is Coming.

Neil Finn of Crowded House said: “(Help Is Coming) was always a song about refugees, even if at the time I was thinking about the immigrants setting off on ships from Europe to America, looking for a better life.

There is such a huge scale and urgency to the current refugee crises that barely a day goes by without some crushing image or news account to confront us. We can’t be silent any more.

Like the diverse immigrants that made America great, these are good people that just want to find somewhere safe to create a better life for their families.”

All proceeds from the song will go to Save the Children and it is available now to download on iTunes, or with a 7” vinyl single available on September 28, though you can pre-order now. Money raised will be used to provide help along the route that refugees take, from Syria through to Greece, Italy and the UK.

via HelpIsComing.org
via HelpIsComing.org

Warning: there’s strong language and subject matter but here is the full poem “Home” from the Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here