The loading
continuing the refugees’ journey
We’re packed,
Stacked, one crushed against the other,
Ehva tight against my breast,
Adam gripping my legs, face hidden,
Barely breathing.
Cattled for the past month,
We’ve gone camp to camp, caged,
Barbed wire cutting us separate from the world,
Ghosts fleshed yet unfleshed, spirits
Briefly haunting the tv screens, and perhaps your dreams,
But we are, remain, forgotten,
Dregs of a war whose currency remains profit
For those hidden yet highly visible few.
I hear the guard approaching –
“Move in,” he shouts, “There’s more of you scum
to come. Move in, you Hell’s whores!”
Behind me an old woman trembles;
The sun has burnt us all, days spent on the road,
No shade, the land barren, despairing,
Dust ground finer beneath our passing feet.
“Get the fuckers loaded” – another voice is raised.
“Use the prod, for fuck’s sake. Get them moving!
They do not belong here.”
We are packed;
the guards’ words reflect reality –
the politicians’ tongue – “You are all welcome” – an act
that shatters as we are tasered,
pushed into the rail trucks,
the doors closing on yet another hope of a home.
Wow! On my first read. I’m going to read this again and again: Maybe I’ll appreciate more of what is my present lot. I have always had empathy for the immigrants (or would-be ones) but it never does any harm to be reminded in such a vivid way, as your poem facilitates. I have an enduring image – put in my head by a TV clip – of dogs being transported in Asia to become food, it is terrifying to me, just as is the plight of those you have so ably described in your poem. Where the bloody hell… Read more »
Thank you for reading Allen. This is a very personal journey, and one which left me broken, mentally and physically, but I came through it, as did the children. There are hidden scars and they surface and I deal with them through poetry.
To answer your question, most people do not know what it is to be human, the privilege of being alive, the miracle that we are and to savour our brief existence.
Blessings
Just like cattle being transported. It conveys the barbarity of humans towards each other; an unsettling read, but all the better for it; thanks P.
Dodge
Life unsettles, Dodgem, and people fall apart, and in that fall they turn the cruelty, which lies just below the skin, on others. I used to dream of death, but the children would not let me die. They are the future.