Lucky ones went with a backpack;
Others with only the clothes on their backs,
since their lives depended on it!
When they arrived an unknown land,
some had to sleep rough,
with no loonie,
and neither food nor water!
No border remembers their names
No anthems rise when they stand,
The wind never asks for their papers,
the sky doesn’t stamp their hands!
They say a country is a mother,
a flag a sheltering roof-
but they’ve slept beneath wider ceilings.
under constellations without proof!
Their cradles were not map lines,
not ink dragged by a distant crown
Before their treaties hardened the earth,
their ancestors walked it brown and boundless!
They come from older permissions-
river-tongue, drum-speech, dust.
From stories carried in bone and breath,
from memory stronger than trust!
Stateless they call them-
as if they were missing limbs,
as if belonging were metal and paper,
as if the soul were trimmed!
Yet they belong to the turning planet,
to the grammar of rain and seed.
They answer to mountains older than parliaments,
to hunger, to hope, to need!
Still-
there are doors that will not open.
There are checkpoints made of stone,
There are children born into waiting rooms,
with no country to call their own!
Stateless is not always freedom.
Sometimes it is a wound w2ithout scar,
a life lived between signatures,
a home that is always afar!
But if you strip them of passports and pledges,
of anthems, of oaths, of claims-
you’ll find they are citizens still
of earth, of fire, of flame!
No border remembers their names.
Yet the ground receives their weights.
And they’ll walk it without permission,
unwritten, unowned!
And if they die,
having being unlucky to be interred by theirs,
other’s children will bury them-
unstate!
@as 030726
