the age of papers!! cheers P just back from seaside
On 27/07/2016 09:27, Max Richards wrote:
> The Office
>
> When a child, she became interpreter
> for her exiled Polish grandmother.
> They would go together
> to the Melbourne office
> for passports and visas -
> renewal time, or some such.
>
> The office teemed with lives in crisis -
> would Australia oblige? Those were days when
> they spoke of displaced persons, ‘reffos’,
> New Australians. Looking round, you saw
> happiness dawn, refusals shatter. All
> smiled on the child helping grandmother.
>
> Decades later, down St Kilda Road,
> she seeks a visa to return to Seattle -
> to resume her studies long-dreamed-of.
> A fortified outpost of the U.S.
> keeps her back. Then: ‘your papers
> are not in order. Go away, start again.’
>
> Hers is hardly urgency they can notice:
> her dog fell ill (she’d left him cared for
> by a person who knows him.) Her return,
> delayed by an oversight, puts study
> in peril - as if the official cares!
> In grandmother’s time, was it different?
>
> Countries are countries, all must have rules.
> Foreigners are feared, borders policed.
> She’s no migrant herself, looking for where
> minds can meet and ideas flourish, though
> her dog-minder now sends word of gunfire,
> a man on her street fallen, CPR failing.
>
> Wednesday 27 July 2016
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