First publication in Global Rights website, on October 24, 2024. Cover image: Graffiti art from the streets of Marseilles, photo by Pina Piccolo.
(Their) STORY (is Ours)
for all refugees and those who seek asylum
1
There is this thin line called
the corpus callosum.
It transects both the geography
and blind terror
of a displaced mind.
There is, also, Citizen,
this imaginary place
called East and West.
Here your patience must wait
for a future condemned
to be force-fed
on the futile fear of the mindless,
mediated now between the meridians
of thought and thoughtlessness.
If you woke alone in
this no-man’s-land
it would hiss hatred
at your presence
like an angry snake
disturbed by its own
selfish sleep.
Here
we must all seek rest
somewhere between memory
and trauma
and the strange yet familiar
sound of screeching voices,
where nothing spoken will ever
make much sense.
Somehow here, mein Führer,
all our words are taken
hostage.
Our Being, already mute with the
chatter of speechlessness,
is now made unbearable with
the lobotomy of borders.
2
There is this thin surgical line
between North and South.
i tiptoe its intense unbalancing
at night
when the oligarchs and their
soldiers sleep and i am alone
in this godless catastrophe
called peace and war
and exile…
3
There is, also, a thin
armed line
between sanity and its sister
where a defeated people have
congregated like ants
in a crowd
aching for the next holocaust
4
for soon we will live
in a century
where they will suspend
all poets and preachers
from street-lights and the
television of crucifixions
like heretics once lit
with a bonfire of books.
5
Already i can hear the
whispering of the applause
while we watch helpless
as they burn our brothers and sisters
in these profane explosions
– their biblical and strategic
obscenities.
6
But between you and me, Lover
there is no thin blue line any more.
Now, there are only dreams of distance.
Your arms held out to this deep Diaspora
for the embrace of Light.
Left and Right now no more than directions in flight.
7
Every where i turn the people flee in boats.
They are crossing these imaginary lines
in our shipwrecked minds
destined now to death
by water.
We drown along-with-them in
newspapers and on screens filled
with the me-and-mine of our illusions,
a rhetoric of despair, the embrace
of sea or land or ocean no longer
even a destination.
Dead or alive, unwanted,
they are written
on the wind
as migrant or refugee,
both nameless and nonentity.
8
There are few beings who will survive
our western philanthropy.
Our own lungs can no longer breathe
with the cost of its crudity.
Its common-sense, its petty profit.
The poverty of our philosophies and lies.
Our greedy geography.
9
This is a story we will never dare tell
our grandchildren:
It has been sickening for 10,000 years.
In all this time a monstrosity
of madmen
have planted so many walls
the sailors’ maps became corpses
with staring eyes.
Our many directions subverted.
they have blurred all our beliefs
with borders and boundaries.
10
But see, all around you
as you slept, Neighbour
our world has now become
such an endlessness of
feet walking,
walking in search of safety
and a place called home.
Not a nation nor a tribe.
Not another lousy lesson by
a cruel schoolmaster
called history!
Not (yet) even: Humanity,
our Hurt, our Unfinished Story.
séamas carraher
15, september – 2 october 2024
Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He lives on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, Ireland, at present. Recent publications include poems in Bone Orchard Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, and the Anthology of Irish Poetry.
