Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Yes it was frightening but exciting too.
We ran across fifty metres of open ground
- oh at least a hundred - right in front
of their guns. It was a miracle they didn’t
open fire. My hair stood on end.
I had goose pimples all over.

The papers we carried cost us a week’s
rations - a year’s wages - and the clothes
were too big, too baggy. Certainly too big.
They smelled foreign but everything that
went on was foreign.

We hid in straw, under piles of vegetables.
At the border soldiers poked with their sticks -
not sticks, they were bayonets - poking deep, this way and that.
One of them tore my sleeve. Here’s the tear, the scratch.

Then we were shut up for eighteen hours -
more like 24 - in that metal container
without bread or water. Precious little air.
Forbidden to talk or move in case
they heard us. It was creepy -
in case the guards heard us.

When we reached these shores, people couldn’t
believe we had done it. I went to the Palace and was decorated.
When we reached these shores, I was detained,
sent to a camp in the north country.

I was a hero, I had escaped from an evil enemy.
Now I am a magistrate. I uphold the rule of law.
I was an asylum seeker escaping persecution
I had faith in this country’s rule of law.

You are at best an economic migrant, at worst
unhealthy, immoral, perhaps criminal
even a terrorist -
we must send you back.

I am an asylum seeker, fleeing an evil enemy.

No. We were the ones who fled the evil enemy.
You are a sponger.

You are an oppressor.

We have nothing in common.
We will send you back.