We Shall Arrive Once We Return

Appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, 18th anniverary issue, March 2025

We shall arrive once we return

I. We no longer have lines of thought
to thread them through the needle’s eye
and patch the bullet-riddled kites,

we no longer have a present
to prop the future from below
the famine-line that girds our waists

and whenever we dare sail the sea
we fare only till the muzzles
of your rifles and may return
alive on a Bloody Sunday

and we have nowhere left to go
from here, and beyond the endless
end of this death there is no beyond,

and beyond this endless exile
you give us the exiled exile
and the exile of the exiled.

II. Take the ravaged seams of our dreams,
the barbed borders of our thoughts,
the thorny air we breathe and bark

your axioms of conquest, recite
your genocidal cliches, infuse
your colonial proverbs and build

your settlements with skeletons,
but whenever you displace us
we will recite our sacred hymns

of departure and fervid songs
of arrival, and we shall prod
the memory stallions to rear

up, adorned with ululations
and ancient stories of this land,
and we pledge we’ll never arrive

until we all return and march
with naked arms through your armor,
through your deathsquads and war machine.

III. And mark my words on a wall:
we shall never arrive alone
but we’ll bring along our lovers

from every corner of the globe,
and import the antivenom
to your poisonous race-disease,

and yet, we shall not arrive until
we’ve truly become a motley
tribe like we’ve always been, adorned

with the colours of the rainbow.