Diasporas

by Brett Rutherford

People scattered
in a human cyclone
fall to strange places,
explode like pine cones
in a bonfire, seeds
spattering, shoots
rising up, roots
and trunk and branches
the aftermath
    of disasters.

Greeks fleeing
too small land,
too little soil
cover the map
with colonies,
city-state the envy
of adjacent empires.
The gods they carried
became everyone’s
alternate family.

China so huge
it exports its people,
a centuries-long
diaspora of misery:
sent to dig
the guano fields
of far Peru, to sweat
for the promise of gold
as railroad coolees,
to roll cigars
in the damp heat in Cuba.

Scots fleeing hunger
    and the Enclosure laws,
Irish, from the whip
    and starvation,
scattered from Nova Scotia
to Tierra del Fuego.

British diaspora from slum
     and galley, to colonies,
branching to Canada,
bringing hot tea
     to burning Australia,
manners and order
     to the confounded
          Buddhist and Hindu.

Africans to everywhere,
     retreading the steps
         of evil slavers,
drums and Orishas
     slipped under the nose
of colonizers. Black river
in brown and white sands,
    object of fear, desire.

Jews driven hither,
     Jews driven yon,
absorbing, withholding,
    and moving on,
a demon myth following
a people of peace.

Romana, the destested
     people, detesting back
the unwelcoming nations,
    dark eyes in wagons
         rolling by.

The Russians, fleeing
     Lenin, Stalin,
and later monsters,
weeping, eat blini
in foreign capitals.
Each, in his heart
returns from exile.

The gay diaspora,
men living abroad,
abhorred by their own
parents and fellows,
some paid, in fact,
to stay away, society’s
“remittance men.”

Other migrations
are underway. Millions
flee the weather, the floods,
the failed crops, the rising sea.
So great this flow shall be
that nations shall be erased
and new ones formed.

The thing about diasporas
is that the place of exile
becomes enriched,
in fact becomes a new thing
upon the earth, amalgam.
There, nothing belongs
    to anyone by birth.
A culture is a cubbyhole
in a large treasure-chest,
its contents free for all.

Just take a breath
in New York City:
the smell of bagels baking,
the fish scent of
    Canal Street open market,
the spicy aroma of curry,
the corner taco stand.

The babel of welcome tongues,
strange and delicious,
on a free street declaiming
the art that was not allowed
back home.