the refugee

​

i am the refugee.

squirming through my skin, moulting once again, roots flailing like driftwood, bashed upon the merciless shore, my tears falling like bitter rain.

home awaits the many, offering comfort and solace.

no home awaits the refugee, just bricks and scattered memories left to submit and to crawl, lost in the ashes of torn yesterdays, a withered identity beyond recall.

i am not a leech, i have committed no crime, i have been long displaced by the wayside, vanishing into the folds of time.

i am the refugee.

as my skin creases with dreary repetition, no abode, no place of solace is found,

having lost myself in half-forgotten alleyways, dazed by the glitzy lights that all around me abound.

i forever trawl, for a place to call home, a dream that within me, perennially stays,

through empty frigid nights, and scorching lonesome days.

i am the refugee.

the stench of xenophobia … … …

( apologies but had to rewrite this piece )

the stench of xenophobia …  … …

1.

when rancid racism strikes,

in cocooned fungal minds, narrow, superficially deep,

an insidious venom begins to seep,

into our consciousness as we sleep.

2.

racist beliefs held so true, so deep,

stripped of feeling,

empty, hollow, feigned, designed, branded as compassion,

feeds the conceit in chests swollen and rotten with self-righteous passion.

3.

the racist xenophobia once firmly entrenched,

envelopes all, not unlike a comforting shawl,

needing more and more bluster to fester, and to mutate,

into doctrines of superiority, bigotry, and new fashioned  hate.

4.

are we guilty of succumbing to this virulent plague?

sipping martinis, and shovelling more, always more onto our heaving plates,

falling, slipping into inebriated stasis, without care,

as the stench of hate, prejudice, gay-bashing,

as the proliferation of anti hindu, muslim, christian, buddhist, and anti people of african and arab heritage and anti-indigenous and anti-semitic and misogynistic drivel and xenophobia,

continues to belch into the polluted air.

​the immigrant at home

fatigued

pained

cast adrift

shunned aside

living

existing

on

islands of despair

deprivation

death

human beings

you and i

who just yesterday

or perhaps many lives ago

 

were

hounded

persecuted

jailed

cursed

spat on

rendered

alien at home

and

then

lost at sea

mere cattle

to be hauled

onto desolate cages

mere cargo

in the

economics of flesh

and

who

now

are

everywhere

cursed

spat on

and

told

to go home 

( for all humans beings living under the yoke of tyranny, occupation, oppression, injustice … and for those who continue to survive and to hope … and to the memory of those who are no longer with us )

double-helixed uBuntu

double-helixed uBuntu.

these interwoven veins,
dna,
double-helixed,

microscopic,
binding us, all of us,
together, as one,

species, one race,
human,

me & you

us,
all,

through
this common
shared
truth:

‘I am because you are’*

all of us
together
as one

me & you = uBuntu*

* – uBuntu is an isiXhosa/isiZulu concept that espouses the “belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”