<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Immigrant The luggage I was dragging behind me There was the plane There was my grandfather, He was there (again), he was \u201cBest of luck<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n and moved away, to let me take a ghost-heart It was then, <\/p>\n Ameerah Arjanee<\/strong> 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<\/em>, published by l’Atelier d’Ecriture in 2011, from which this poem is taken.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2979,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions\/2979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>on reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’
\n<\/em>
\nLast night, I found
\nmyself floating through an airport
\nso white it seemed like
\nthe inside of a shell
\nseen from a baby’s eyes<\/p>\n
\nwas light with nostalgic brightness,
\nfull of cellotaped books and
\nmy mother’s screech, her laugh<\/p>\n
\nstanding majestic at
\nthe wide styrofoam doors,
\nbig and bulky like a
\nprotective bird.
\nUniversal airlines.<\/p>\n
\nwho had long since (since when?)
\npacked his smile in a coffin
\nand taken flight one quiet
\nmorning in Mauritius<\/p>\n
\nsuntanned, wearing an officer’s
\nuniform with a blurred name tag;
\nhis gentle hands stapled my tickets,
\ngave them back to me.
\nSmiling at me (again)
\na smile which was oddly distant, he
\nsaid in a voice ephemeral as sunshine:<\/p>\n
\nstep through those wide styrofoam doors,
\nretracting like a breathing uterus<\/p>\n
\nmid-way through that birth,
\nthat I woke up in cool sweat,
\namong tangled sheet and
\nhot Mauritian winter-
\nlight-headed and sharp
\nfrom a voyage through myself;
\nan immigrant, between
\ndreaming and waking.<\/p>\n