Nothing to Declare

There is no name for what rises in you 
as you enter the dim world of the taxi
and wheel through the night, escorted 
by smooth jazz and a battalion of street-
lights. At the airport, you heave the bags 
you have stuffed to the limits of carriage 
and check them in. You have no trouble 
knowing what to do with your empty 
hands. At security, the usual stripping.
You surrender your body to the scan, 
the searching sweep, as if what is dangerous 
is not what cannot be so easily detected.
You comply. At the gate, grateful to be 
early, you sit with your books, plug in 
devices that tether you to this place 
you’re meant to be leaving, that crowd 
out thoughts of arrival and its bittersweet
complications. Yuh going home or just visiting,
someone will ask, and you never know
how you will answer. You know the bones
of your mother’s brown arms will wind 
around you, her breath against your neck
will baptize you again in names you have 
no one to call you in the other place 
you belong to. You know the waiting
untended in you will surge toward her,
and you know something else will sink, 
sulk itself into a familiar, necessary sleep.
You know yourself now only as the ocean 
knows this island—always pulling away, 
always, always, returning.

Copyright © 2021 by Lauren K. Alleyne. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“I’ve lived in the United States for over twenty years, and still, whether I’m on a flight to Port-of-Spain or to JFK, I say I’m ‘going home.’ The fluidity and liminality of the immigrant experience—at least mine—is intensified in the airport, which is a hard marker of leaving one space for another; it’s a place I’ve always found surreal in its between-ness. In this poem I tried to pay attention to how the space I was leaving, the space I was in, and the space I was headed to were all impacting my body and my internal world, to witness myself in transition from one home to another.”
—Lauren K. Alleyne