Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)

Read by Warsan Shire

This Poem is a Diaper

 

This poem is the forearms on the table of a friend listening to MutaBaruka, Archibald, Judith and Diane.

This poem is a gift bag stuck together by someone at the assembly line table.

This poem could care less what gift is stuffed in this gift bag poem.

This poem makes life hard on the assembly line table in Rio Bravo.

This poem has its hand on your breast and leers in your eyes as you try to stick together the gift bag on the assembly line table.

This poem won’t allow you to go to the bathroom.

This poem could care less you are bursting and tired.

This poem is a diaper worn by a woman working at an assembly line table.

This poem says why are you taking so many breaks from this poem.

This poem is your blood-full pad that proves why you are taking so many breaks from this poem.

This poem is the welt on your cheek where this poem struck you hard for laughing when you showed your blood-full pad.

This poem thinks it needs a drink probably to get through this poem.

This poem is your friends’ laughter as you tell them about your blood-full pad in this poem’s face.

This poem returned to work the following day.

This poem is the smile that rose under the welt on this poem’s cheek as you remembered this poem’s friends.

This poem was fired and this poem quit at the same time.

This poem never quit.

This poem is a book that is thrust in your hand and says all of this poem is illegal.

This poem is the whisper that rises and chants under welts across the planet to form a big movement of these poems.

This poem is a house burning down for talking about this poem.

This poem is an inner tube carrying people quietly across the river.

This poem is how it was then and how it is now.

This poem is a dark car racing to the border on a night with no street lamps.

This poem walks across the border with a flash light and speeds away to tell about this poem.

This poem is a sigh of relief.

This poem found out life is hard on the assembly line table.

This poem wonders why you’d ever use prose to get across this poem.

This poem is a text message and this poem can talk to workers in China, Korea, Honduras, and Brazil.

This poem is a date on the calendar to vote about a union for this poem.

This poem changes the date for no good reason and changes it again.

This poem is on strike against this poem.

This poem is a calendar with days that don’t shift away from this poem.

This poem is a union formed by assembly line workers on a particular date on the calendar.

This poem is a new policy.

This poem is passed by all houses, ratified by all presidents, and shored up by this poem written by high courts across the whole planet.

This poem is a new way of interacting.

This poem is relaxing a little.

This poem is laughter on the buses, on all the buses across the planet.

This poem is laughter in the bar, in all the bars across the planet.

This poem is laughter in the coffee house, in all the coffee houses across the planet.

This poem is herbal tea sipped slowly at night time.

This poem is a flashback to rain on a jail cell’s metal roof in San Salvador.

This poem of rain is so loud on the metal roof that you can’t hear if someone could be coming across the courtyard outside.

This poem sings Mother Mary come to me and feels better.

This poem is changing.

This poem is moving forward.

 

Donna Hoffman, Austin, TX, 5/31/2013

My information and perspectives in this poem come from participating in the solidarity movements for peace and justice in Central America during the 1980’s and for labor rights in Texas, upstate New York, Ireland, and on the Mexican border with Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera.