The speaker begins the poem by acknowledging a truth he's always been aware of: that his mother "dreamed of a paradise" beyond war and mass departures. The words "paradise" and "exodus" may allude to the biblical book of Exodus. This book chronicles the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, where they were enslaved. This opening frames the mother's past without giving the reader any concrete details: she grew up in a place filled with violence, a place from which people fled in huge numbers.
The opening three lines ("I know now [...] war and exodus.") express the speaker's sense of disappointment on behalf of his mother—who presumably no longer dreams of paradise—and also the speaker's own sense of awe towards his mother, who survived all this "war and exodus."
These lines also establish the poem's interesting use of punctuation (or, really, it's refusal to use traditional punctuation). While there is a comma within the first line and a period at the end of the third line, there is no clarifying punctuation at the ends of these lines. Instead, the poet relies on white space and the reader's own instincts.
This lack of punctuation gives the illusion of enjambment in lines that are not actually enjambed. Both lines one and two are technically end-stopped—there are implied pauses after "wonder" and "paradise"—but, thanks to the lack of punctuation, the reader can't actually know this for certain until their eye drops to the following line and it becomes clear that a new clause has begun.
The effect is a kind of tension between one line and the next. The reader is not certain whether they should pause for breath or not (as opposed to an obviously end-stopped line or an obviously enjambed line, both of which indicate whether one should pause for breath).
Perhaps this is indicative of the speaker's relationship with his own childhood and with his mother's past; the speaker is not comparing his current knowledge with the knowledge he had as a child, but rather expressing a continuity between these two states of "wonder." In other words, the speaker has always been and remains in awe of his mother's life and the difficulties she has faced.