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Part of my reluctance to write on citizenship is that as a poet, a worker in delicate, would-be-truthful language, I am wary of pronouncements on current affairs Questions of citizenship are best left to people who handle data well and accurately – experts in politics or law, rights and borders; those who deal in facts, not feelings Poetry’s stuff is the everyday; the texture of lived experience; the simple mechanics and music of words If I generalised from what happened to me personally, wouldn’t I be part of the problem? Now, however, actual hurt has been done to me When ‘citizens of everywhere’ are dismissed and derided, my entire world is attacked My childhood is wiped out   Let me explore a little of what I mean But, before that: what was it like for you after the ‘Brexit’ referendum? Did you feel exhausted? Afraid to leave your room? Did you read the faces of your neighbours when you did go out? Did you see them reading your face? Did you mistrust your reading of their reading (if they were reading at all)? Did they look extra kind and upset by the sight of you and apologetically make space in supermarket aisles? Did you report them to the police for cursing you at your front door? Did you have impulses to kiss or punch strangers on the bus? Did you start recalling words in languages your family had carefully lost? Did you forget words, demented pauses dotting your conversation? Did you start going through your possessions, sorting and discarding; checking visa rules for other countries; dreaming of dead, unknown great-grandmothers who had been unpersoned, killed or disappeared? Were you shouted at by your doctor’s receptionist? Were you shaken in your sense of ‘home’?   This happened to me, and to many of my friends So it was not enough to pay taxes Not enough to love your fellow-creatures, Marmite, football, or the rain I discussed, with a Polish-Scottish friend, the possibility of a kind of trans-generational post-traumatic stress disorder We settle here; but the ghosts of history, the oppressions, migrations, escapes, re-rootings, re-routings,