Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Robert Browning
Thomas Hardy
Charlotte Mew
Charles Causley
Seamus Heaney
Simon Armitage
Carol Ann Duffy
Owen Sheers
Andrew Waterhouse
Percy Bysshe Shelley
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Robert Browning
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Wilfred Owen
Seamus Heaney
Ted Hughes
Simon Armitage
Carol Ann Duffy
Imtiaz Dharker
Carol Rumens
John Agard
Beatrice Garland
The title “Emigrée” suggests the persona is female. The poem’s subject is the dilemma of the emigree, forced by war or conflict to leave her home, and the longing to return. Although she barely remembers it other than through the innocent lens of the child she was and she thoroughly regrets leavi...
There once was a country… I left it as a child
but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
for it seems I never saw it in that November
which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.
The worst news I receive of it cannot break
my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,
but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes
glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks
and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.
That child’s vocabulary I carried here
like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.
Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.
It may by now be a lie, banned by the state
but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.
I have no passport, there’s no way back at all
but my city comes to me in its own white plane.
It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;
I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.
My city takes me dancing through the city
of walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.
They accuse me of being dark in their free city.
My city hides behind me. They mutter death,
and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.
Émigrée was written by Carol Rumens.