MIGRANTS / JEAN BINTA BREEZE MBE / #WhosYourNeighbour?

As we continue to look towards this year’s Autumn tour, here’s a poem by our own Jean Binta Breeze – taken from her latest collection, Third World Girl (Bloodaxe Books) and pre-dating the current refugee crisis.

Over the next month we’ll be sharing more poems in response to this issue, linking to more initiatives and engaging with our tour campaign and question – ‘Who’s your Neighbour?’

If you’d like to get involved, please tweet us @3HardWayPoets along with the hashtag #WhosYourNeighbour – with a link to a responding work as text and/or as a recorded reading. For full details on the campaign see here.

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MIGRANTS
(for those who drown between Africa and Europe)

I love this land
never thought of owning it
till you came
and fenced it all
stamped your name upon it
pushed me to the edge

I should have killed you then

years passed
I was slowly starving
so I crossed to where you came from
but you set up borders

So here I am
drowning in the oceans in between
tangled in the nets you set
for fish.

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