Unlike the Mongols before them,
this is a horde that raises no dust,
and handles neither bullet nor sword;
theirs is a different sort of invasion:
one involving visa and suitcases
that slide neatly right under their seats.
No one city can claim them; every street
that they walk might as well be in Chicago,
Chennai, Taipei or Dubai. ‘Geography’
is a word they often hear but consider
both vast and useless. What is life if not
brief glimpses of rivers, suburbs, of houses
they will never sit still in? Such thoughts
are best left to the nights and there are
not a few sleepless ones… This is a tribe
highly prone to nostalgia and familiar
to places like building sites, kitchens –
to stalls where the scrubbers of toilets
dream of old patients and stethoscopes.
In the land of their birth, each end
of the month is an occasion for a feast,
one bought by the cash which they wire
across mountains and oceans. Adaptable,
tireless, long-legged and peaceful – this
is a species whose turf covers the whole
of this brightly lit and bewildering world:
like the lichen, the mollusc, the killer whale,
or even the monarch butterfly – an insect
that mates and reproduces during its journey,
so that each larva always wakes in a land
both excitingly new and terrifyingly foreign,
and every successive generation carries on
with the next stage of their endless migration.