Immigrant
on reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’
Last night, I found
myself floating through an airport
so white it seemed like
the inside of a shell
seen from a baby’s eyes
The luggage I was dragging behind me
was light with nostalgic brightness,
full of cellotaped books and
my mother’s screech, her laugh
There was the plane
standing majestic at
the wide styrofoam doors,
big and bulky like a
protective bird.
Universal airlines.
There was my grandfather,
who had long since (since when?)
packed his smile in a coffin
and taken flight one quiet
morning in Mauritius
He was there (again), he was
suntanned, wearing an officer’s
uniform with a blurred name tag;
his gentle hands stapled my tickets,
gave them back to me.
Smiling at me (again)
a smile which was oddly distant, he
said in a voice ephemeral as sunshine:
“Best of luck”
and moved away, to let me take a ghost-heart
step through those wide styrofoam doors,
retracting like a breathing uterus
It was then,
mid-way through that birth,
that I woke up in cool sweat,
among tangled sheet and
hot Mauritian winter-
light-headed and sharp
from a voyage through myself;
an immigrant, between
dreaming and waking.
Ameerah Arjanee lives in Mauritius. She writes stories and poems because she sings horribly, has poor kinesthetic intelligence and cannot dance, gets mediocre academic results, and cannot make rabbits appear out of top hats. She has won a couple of prizes, including the Foyle Young Poets award, and has been published in a couple of e-zines and anthologies. She had a small collection of poetry, to the universe, published by l’Atelier d’Ecriture in 2011, from which this poem is taken.