Sunday Poem: Indefinite Leave to Remain By Dominique Santos
Intensity is done
Wondering
What comes next?
We, immigrant
Moving nations
Not across borders
But inside bodies
Our blue eyed son
The reminder of migrations past
That cut across
Boundaries made from desks and glass partitions
The inventions of form filling
Line making
Appetite suppressing
This Indefinite Leave To Remain
Speaks of staying
The softness of the story, human sized and roughly hewn; indistinct
Asks for audience
But, childlike, must quiet itself
Elevating certainty above ambiguity
For the egalitarian process
Of proven mutual addresses
Credit card payments
The evidence of our good citizenship
Going home, bus driver rides angry,
Son of forced movements
Sugar sweetened with the cultivation of recruitment promises
Cushioned beneath a Jubilee weekend
Sixty diamond years of continental drift
Culminate in a penstroke declaration
That what we are is enough
That what we are is the truth
The pragmatism of surrender
Another layer on the foreshore
1000 ships sailing by.