A Stateless Poem

by Danielle Legros Georges

‘A Stateless Poem’ addresses a September 2013 ruling by the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court that stripped citizenship of Dominican-born persons without a Dominican parent, going back to 1929. The majority of persons affected are Dominicans of Haitian descent.

If you are born, and you are stateless,
if you are born, and you are homeless,

if your state and home are not
yours—and yet everything you know—

what are you? Who are you? And who
am I without the dark fields I walk upon,

the streets I know, the blue corners
I call mine, the ones you call yours …

Who am I to call myself citizen, and
human and free? And who are you

to call yourself landed and grounded,
and free. And who is judge enough?

Who native? Who other?

And who are we who move so freely
without accents of identification,

without skin of identification, with
all manner of identification. With

gold seals of approval. With stamps
of good fortune. With the accident

of blameless birth. Who are we to be
so lucky?

Reproduced with permission from Danielle Legros Georges. Copyright 2016. Originally published by Barrow Street Press as “A Dominican Poem” in The Dear Remote Nearness of You.

Danielle Legros Georges

Danielle Legros Georges is an academic, translator, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Motten book prize. Her awards include fellowships and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. She was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019. She is a professor of creative writing and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo by Jennifer Waddell.