Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

One of my favorite things about words is their history. As a writer, I’m curious about the words I choose for my poems. When I look up the origin of a word, it’s like unfolding a map, and seeing the journey that word has taken to reach me. Suddenly I know it better. It feels special to me, like a friend.

Let’s take the word migrant, for example—a word I’ve used in a poem. Migrant comes from the Latin migrans, meaning "changing place." So a migrant is one who moves from place to place. The adjective migratory is related to migrant. As in migratory birds. The verb migrate is related, too.

On any given day, reading or watching or listening to the news, I’m confronted with divisive arguments about where people belong. All over the world, there are violent conflicts over land: invasions and occupations. In the US, there is so much talk about our borders, and about immigrants, and particularly alarming lately, talk about citizenship. Many of those arguments seem so focused on difference that they ignore our common humanity.

The words we use matter. The language we choose can strip a person’s dignity from them, or restore that dignity. When undocumented immigrants are called “illegals,” or “illegal aliens,” those words carry meaning. They also carry a heavy negative connotation. Those terms are dehumanizing, and I think that’s the point.

I’ve been listening to the words being used for immigrants, for refugees, and for asylum-seekers in this country, and I have been watching their mistreatment. I have friends who work at elementary schools, and who are afraid that ICE will come and take their students, or their students’ parents. From SCHOOL. I have friends who are afraid for their loved ones, their neighbors, their coworkers.

This country does not feel like a place of freedom and possibility for those seeking a better life. It feels like an increasingly hostile place.

Today’s poem looks at the word migrant and its meaning apart from the current political climate. Movement from place to place, after all, suggests possibility, opportunity, and AGENCY. To migrate, whether you can fly or not, is to be free.

/’mīgrent/
by Tiana Nobile

Of an animal, especially a bird. A wandering species
whom no seas nor places limit. A seed who survives despite
the depths of hard winter. The ripple of a herring 
steering her band from seas of ice to warmer strands. 

To find the usual watering-places despite the gauze
of death that shrouds our eyes
is a breathtaking feat. Do you ever wonder why
we felt like happy birds brushing our feathers

on the tips of leaves? How we lifted our toes
from one bank of sand and landed—fingertips first—
on another? Why we clutched the dumb and tiny creatures
of flower and blade and sod between our budding fists?

From an origin of buried seeds emerge
these many-banded dagger wings.
We, of the sky, the dirt, and the sea. We,
the seven-league-booters and the little-by-littlers.

We, transmigrated souls, will prevail.
We will carry ourselves into the realms of light.

“/’mīgrent/” by Tiana Nobile from CLEAVE © 2021 Tiana Nobile. Used by permission of Hub City Press.