This week’s poem has no author listed. It is a found poem, assembled from statements made by a roomful of people at the East End Community School in Portland on World Refugee Day in 2015. This group of people, from many different cultures and places, shared food, conversation and stories as part of a series of events organized by community leaders and local writers.
The words to this found poem were arranged by Mihku Paul and yours truly. Paul is a poet and artist and a Maliseet Indian who grew up in Old Town. The poem, on this inauguration weekend, speaks for itself.
We Fall and Get Up
Listen – let the sound be sweet, homesick,
pressed against the glass, my love,
Khartoum, my, your, our landscape,
wander with me, with us, this map
we make to a place we need to have, a home,
path-making, interrupting, remaking
the neat sounds. Sound the alarm –
let hurt be seen and honored,
let other countries live here:
English, Acholi, Khmer, Somali, Spanish.
Let asphalt mix with dirt and fruit
and hope by the spoonful
that gives you just enough strength
to carry your family on your back.
Conjure a home, a place to exhale.
Brave mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,
enduring, leaving everything, uprooted,
inventing another language.
Give it, give us a handle to carry it,
to give it out, to set it down.
Forge from the edge
a language for the center of each of us.
How hard, how crucial, this juicy mango
pride, this honest way through pain,
through what had to happen, to get to:
“I am because you are.”
“We are because you are.”
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. This column is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
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