Sunday 7 August 2016

Sea-Bird’s Lament

Posted by Rorine Tioti *

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Sunset at Sea 1879.

Over the tree tops, in the branches
Is my home sweet home
Now cut and destroyed
For your Home Sweet Home
I fly over the horizon to the setting sun
To nowhere, to find a new home



* Rorine Tioti is a citizen of Kiribati.

2 comments:

Keith said...

Thank you, Rorine, for an intensely visual poem. Sense of airiness, literal and figurative. Enjoyed rereading the poem several times. But also made me think, yet again, about how capricious stewards of our environment we have been . . .

Thomas O. Scarborough said...

The Kiribati people are threatened with the possible loss of their homeland, which is their heart and soul. Many have already been resettled through exploitation of their mineral wealth, which stripped away 90% of one island's surface.

This is a poem which will be relevant the world over. One may think, too, of the San in Southern Africa (my own home), as one among many examples present and past. But it is not only the more obvious examples we may contemplate.

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