Another favourite, Ruth Padel.

How much I have learnt and enjoyed from her.
Grab a revamped passport she says in her poem. Yes I will.

To Speak of Distance

To speak of distance, the sanctuary lamp:

something you must do or find

and a world you must escape. Never mind

ghost-rumours of an immigration gate.

Grab a revamped passport. Speak of hope,

born as she always is on the site of loss:

a cinnamon bird

with a thousand resistance strategies

fretting her wings like mica charms

or ancient pilgrim songs

sewn into the Book of Psalms. The task

is to assimilate - to move between

the languages, in your case

Hebrew, Arabic, Norwegian, Greek –

and celebrate your journey to the shrine.

Everyone’s crossing is a pilgrimage.

The hard thing is to pass; harder still, to fold

those wings, to drop the mask

and translate old words

into new. Jump to it – you’ll find

fresh bearings somewhere for a crossing-place.

This is our exodus: cliffs of fall

on a floating island. Here is our constitution.

Look, here are the moon and sun

in never-before-seen positions, struggling to be heard.

Listen to Ruth Padel performing her poem here.

Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature.