A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Walter Holland
My Deportation
To be sent back after I went forth.
Once I thought I knew you. Estranged from
there I came to here. Estranged from here
you want me to go back to there, a where
I hardly knew. You’d insist I’d not existed
when it was expedient for me to assist you, to do
the things you wouldn’t do. Of course you resisted
ever asking. But nonetheless you asked, you asked
that I do this and I do that, and always asked me back.
What origin or residence did you ever think
was yours? Was mine? My here you said was always there,
and then you said I had to be here and here on time.
You never really saw me, but now you see me everywhere!
This place I dug up, cleaned up and repaired, you
asked me to care, but you never really cared. Now you see
my rights as wrong and see my wrongs as a reason to be gone.
Walter Holland is the author of the poetry collections Reconstruction (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Chelsea Station Editions, revised edition, 2011).
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.
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