I heard this poem on CBC radio this morning...and I couldn't move or think until it was over. When you wonder what to think about the refugees coming ashore in Europe, think of these lines:
"no one would leave home/unless home chased you to the shore"
"no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land"
and "home is the barrel of the gun."
HOME
Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.
you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don't know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.
Also discussed here.
Spectacular poem. It really lays bare the reasoning behind most of the refugees, I think. saying- leave, run away from me now It's easy to look at the refugee crisis from an economic, detached view but I think you miss out on something very important if you just do that. no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
Thanks for the reminder lil. With all the text and figures about economic impacts, how much governments might have to spend "handling" the crisis, it's easy to forget what's really happening. Thanks.
Thank you for writing this! The poem is amazing. I agree that immigration is not what most people want. All of us are better off in our homes. You feel comfortable and secure. Plus, there is no language barrier and no discrimination. Immigrants pay a very high psychological price for living abroad. Your motherland is your treasure.
Thanks for writing Ana... The author is a Somali-British poet named Warsan Shire.
No, you don't understand! Those people that leave their homes and in some cases, their families behind, to go on a mortally dangerous journey without a garantee to find better lives - they just want to take your precious culture away from you! /s
It literally translates to "end sarcasm." The slash is a coding symbol in HTML (and possibly other languages) commonly used to indicate an end or a stop of something. For instance if I wanted to bold something I would say <b> and then </b>. I assume reddit helped it evolve although I have seen it around other forums. It would take a programmer, probably, or a math person (/= sometimes is used to mean "does not equal") to be familiar with the use of the slash as such. And I'm sure it started as /sarcasm and went from there. I thought some context might be interesting.