One of the things I did with the groups of refugees we’ve taken up to Old Oswestry Hillfort over the last two months was to create collaborative poems with them. The words were spoken by people from Ukraine, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iran, and then I have edited them together.

Here’s a poem about how we all stood on the very top of the hillfort, looking out over the long views that the Celtic peoples gazed out on some 3000 years before we did. We used compasses to locate the directions of the places our group had come from.

DIRECTIONS

This field is beautiful, it’s like being in a dream.
Flowers in the wind, a bee, a butterfly.
If there are not enough bees, our lives will be finished.

This hill reminds me of Afghanistan.
My father’s house is just there.
My father’s field is just below us.
I feel at home.

On the hillfort we all wave to Sierra Leone
We all wave to Kiev
We all wave to Istanbul
We all wave to Kabul
We all wave to Korea

We send our love.

Directions don’t change.
They’ve been here a long time.

And we shared the words for ‘tree’ in different languages, which led to this poem:

TREE

Today is a fulfilled day. Trust me
we are usually too busy even to say hello
to each other, but today we can talk,
we can listen, we learn
about flowers and history.
And we all know what a tree is.

Tree Crann Derevo Stick
Guai Ağacı Drakht

Back home, we had war in our country.
We had places like this, we called it
a trench, it’s for fighting.
So I thought, Is this a warzone too?
The wind howled in my ear.

Tree Crann Derevo Stick
Guai Ağacı Drakht

Today we are all immigrants
here in this place. We learn
a new country together.
It’s beautiful to be people, together.
We all know what a tree is.

Tree Crann Derevo Stick
Guai Ağacı Drakht

I’m enjoying this project so much, it feels really serious and meaningful. I’m learning.