Asylum

     ‘I will take you myself on my shoulders and the task will not
     weigh heavy on me’
     – Vergil, Aeneid II, 708
 
The young women here are headscarved and majestic
and they drive like fury along the city’s unmade roads.
Do they, in the marrow of their quick bones, remember
 
how one night they were hoisted on their fathers’ shoulders
and the blanket that was flung over their sleepy dark heads
like another dusk? How not so long ago a man ran and ran
 
through the ruinous flames, and on his back his own father
still clasping the household gods to his shrunken chest
in case one day there would be a home again to put them in –
 
not a burnt-out truck or fenced-in camp on the edge of town,
but honey-cakes and thick coffee, the evening star to steer by?
 

Lesley Saunders

first published – as the prize-winning poem – in Live Canon 2015 Anthology,
ISBN 978-1-9097031-3-1;
video recording at YouTube