THE RIVER, THE RAIN, THE SALT, AND THE WOUND. A poem

On immigration, citizenship, and the ceremony

12.06.2025. I am officially a British citizen. Nigerian, and British.

The morning is beautiful, the leaves are green and my parents are shining stars.

Today is the ceremony, the thing we’ve been labouring towards for 21 years, and it’s finally here.

The first song that plays swells in my throat, and the melancholy is overwhelming. I can feel the flight, the wave pulling you up to surface, the arrival of the sky— and yet, the stone in the pit of your stomach.

The worry that your body is too downtrodden to float, to pierce through the current and do the thing you’ve been dreaming. The thing that seemed impossible the moment the police turned to your older sister with disdain and took your mother away in handcuffs. Not yet dawn.

Years later, I learn that my father was there that night, but he jumped from a window and stayed away for a while. The knowing that two parents in jail and no income to dig your way out— my heart aches for my mother, my heart aches for my father. You learn to always think in exit plans.

University.

I live away from home, and soon my heart begins to races when the doorbell rings unexpectedly. I have to say Please tell me if someone is coming over, because I panic, and I don’t know why. I connect the dots later when it all rises to the surface and I am unable to graduate. I say this, because on this day, that first song that plays allows me to hold everything at once, and it disturbs me. The knowing. The choice in the knowing.

The song is Experience by Ludovico Einaudi. I hold up my phone with Shazam on the screen because I want to know.

Because the song is beautiful. Because this moment holds meaning, and my parents, my mother, is so happy to be here. And I am happy too, even though I can’t smile, not properly.

The photographer forces it out of me, but really, I was searching for my father amongst the witnesses— because I knew he’d be smiling, and that would make me smile.

We buy the photographs. And despite the forced smile, I cherish them,

because they exposes the complexities, the contradiction. And I can feel my mother’s joy

That the ceiling has revealed itself a sky,

and I didn’t realise how constrained I felt,

until that first breath outside the Palladian house.

I had counselling after the ceremony. I cried. Her face was stone. I cried. Her face remained stone. So I left and looked for a body of water.

I still carry the fear, but it’s easier to silence. What’s important is movement.

That I release myself from the past and know that I have the same right to exist as anyone else. That I am enough, and worthy of a good life— not a bare life — just because of borders. That we are all worthy.

I write this with the context of the current climate in mind, the anti-migrant rhetoric that is embedded in Western media, in our governments, the ICE raids happening in LA, human beings detained in dehumanising conditions— routine acts of state terror.

I’m afraid to ask my mother about her experience. But I know it was under a year, that it was God that carried her through it, that above all, you want to protect your children — and even then, we hear everything. It seeps through.

I am grateful for my parents. For the choices they made. For where we are now. And it’s taken twenty-one years— but here we are.

There are other families of trees to discover, different kinds of birds to observe, there’s a world outside of this country, and we can move from beyond the dream

into possibility, into probability, if I get serious about saving.

I want to tell you that I’m afraid

that even now the sky is there, I still won’t make it. Have faith, runs circles across my mind.

This poem is also a love letter to the land itself—land that precedes the nation-state, that holds memory, that I love even as I fear the structures built on it. And I don’t think it offers any resolution, I just needed to hold the contradictions. That’s what I’ve learned to do, to hold two truths at once, to allow the complexity.

Doors are open

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

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