We’ll dig our silverware and our ancestral
coat of arms out from under the floorboards,
pack our dictionaries, scribble down one
or two recipes in the shorthand of our village.
Each of you can bring a favourite toy.
We’ll wait for a festival or a riot
in the capital and then slip out
past briefly-vacated border posts.
The world will open loving arms. Everywhere
they sympathize with our cause. One day
you will learn a new anthem
and a new set of slogans, the rules
of foreign games, a million ways to fill your free
time. I’ll show you how to create
miniature governments in exile
with your friends, the children of other
émigrés, with whom I’ll converse
loudly in public about the smuggled-out reports
of a place that does not change,
a place that no longer sustains us.
One day the secret police will creep
through the plumbing of this ole house
and find nobody to spy on.
~ from Undercurrents, New Voices in Canadian Poetry,
edited by Robyn Sarah (Cormorant Books, 2011)
