Litter Around a Rubbish Fire is a migrant poem I wrote while thousands of people are stuck between Turkey and Greece and no one wants them.
Litter Around a Rubbish Fire – Migrant Poem
First, you take candle grease and old newspaper and then, on the frayed inkless edge, you etch a new you basking in buckets of cash stuffing some in an envelope and bet Mother's eyes light up she runs to the store and picks Chardonnay for his dinner and leans back on the settee, clear why you're now here warming dirty hands on smouldering trash, litter around a rubbish fire. You hear pipes and trumpets, bright tales of the unlived beyond the barbwire, sons with prospects grandchildren barely born women more daughter than mother. And you do not know why the guards won't lee you passage, why your child gets tear-gased why no one will hand you a form. But you do. Then, you loosen the soil and water the seeds and after that, in the glaring blue above, you rub out clouds erasing tremors oiling your skin and hedge the kids lick icecream mid-glass-scaling square for their breakfast and hopscotch across the slabs, clear why the stench of burning plastic is now choking the twigs inside, a fence opposite a police cordon. Sandwiched, we eat ballads and legends cousin Ali is a bank manager and drives a Porsche, decades ago, Grandfather's brother opened a food stall and today, cousin Malala runs a chain of posh eateries. Yet the guy with the puffer jacket says it doesn't matter if the wire cuts it, first wage pack, he'll do better. Of course. For weeks, the air thins and limbo narrows and on it goes in the sunken cheeks of them and us, you cast the last branch, flesh gulping flames whispers hatching, and wager the family homes away happy to cook meat for every meal and twin stories from south to north, clear why now we strip ourselves from the strip the slither between one law and another. From out of ashes, we run and squeeze between spikes and wire thorns laced along the border to keep us out, shots fired, mouthsful of gravel but then, we slip through and run for the hills. True, the air is sweet and the grass is long enough to bed us. Mother smiles and Father sips what never skimmed his tongue before. In the end, lesser beginnings and smaller balloons above ground just, you kick it when it begins sinking, hatching, still hatching hedging that one day very soon and pledge one day we turn in home with silver and yield gold at the root of our tree.
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