“Move On” – A poem by Pip Rea, our Director of Community Services

Move On
They say it casually.
As if it is simple.
As if movement were choice.

Move on.

From the doorway that kept the rain off your sleeping bag.
From the patch of concrete where the security guard knows your name.
From the corner where you can see who is coming.
From the only place that has felt, in some fragile way, predictable.

Move on.

As if belonging were portable.
As if safety could be folded into a backpack.
As if trauma loosens its grip
just because legislation tightens its own.

We are told this is about order.
About safety.
About restoring comfort
to those who feel discomfort
at the sight of poverty.

But what of the discomfort
of waking every hour to footsteps?
Of holding your belongings as you sleep
in case you must run?
Of being told, again and again,
that your presence is the problem?

A move-on order does not create a home.
It does not conjure a door that locks from the inside.
It does not quiet the nervous system
that has learned, through years and years,
that nowhere is safe for long.

It simply says
“not here”.

And when “not here”
echoes from every street, every alcove, every park bench,
what it becomes
is nowhere.

We know the stories behind the sleeping bags.
The childhoods that did not hold.
The violence survived.
The care that fractured.
The rent that rose faster than hope.
The wages that did not stretch.
The grief that had nowhere to land.

We know that rough sleeping
is not a moral failure
but a systems failure.
Not a choice
but the absence of choices.

And we know
because we see it every day
that what builds change
is not expulsion
but connection.

A hot meal placed gently in someone’s hands.
A name remembered.
A chair pulled up.
A conversation that does not rush.
A key offered.
A door opened.

“Move on”
pushes people further to the edges
of a city that already forgets them.

It moves them out of sight,
but not out of pain.

It deepens the line
between “us” and “them”
a line we have spent years
trying to erase.

Because there is no “us” and “them.”
There is only us.

A country is measured
not by how quickly it can clear a doorway,
but by how bravely it can hold
those with nowhere else to go.

So if we must speak of movement,
let it be this:

Move us toward housing.
Move us toward dignity.
Move us toward trauma-informed care.
Move us toward courage.

Move us
toward one another.