The poem, At the Border,1979 follows Choman Hardi and her family crossing the border from Iran to Kurdistan in this partly autobiographical piece. Her family is moving back to Kurdistan after moving to Iran four years earlier and later in 1988 they had to flee because Saddam Hussein started bombing the Kurdish people with chemical weapons and finally entered Britain as a refugee. The main themes of this poem is migration and the effects of genocide on it’s people.

This poem follows no set poetic structure with many stanzas or lines ending abruptly usually with some type of punctuation at the end of the sentence. This symbolises the random nature of these man made borders which have split up ancient civilisations. The language wouldn’t necessarily considered poetic but many of the words could have different connotations creating a semantic field of what is the idea of home now and how the narrator is tired of nationalism. This poem is written from four different peoples point of view: the adult refugees, the guards and the two children (five year old Choman and her sister).

Choman hardi uses physical features of the land to make a point about how even though there is a border between the two countries, it’s all the same land in the end “The autumn soil continued on the other side with the same colour, the same texture.” This also shows that that these man made borders don’t affect the actual nature of the land and shows there is something greater than these borders. The adults tell the children that “landscape is more beautiful” and “people are much kinder.” but the children are seeing that nothing is changing on each side of the border “It rained on both sides of the chain.” showing that the adults have a romanticised version of there home country and the children are seeing how the country actually is.