ASYLUM
Send them back, we say,
those refugees,
the nameless millions seeking sanctuary.
The faceless hoards. Like pigs
we herd them in a pen.
What need have we to lie awake
in the laundered linen of our beds
and think or feel or give a dam.
You cannot sell humanity.
You cannot buy their pain.
For it isn’t you or you or even I
must leave the place we once called home –
the charred and smoky remnants of our lives –
surrounded by the brute hostility,
the naked hatred in our neighbours’ eyes.
For it isn’t you or you or even I
that terror hounds within the night
and stalks its fearful prey.
We do not lie alone in empty beds
where once our gentle lover laid his head.
It’s not our children that we hold
and rock and rock throughout the long,
long night.
Not us must fail to find the words,
not us who have no answer for,
not us who cannot fill
their dark eyed holes of broken trust
that plead with us to find redemption
for a loss too soon
to even know its name.
So send them back, we say,
our hearts are closed.
We have no room.
Transforming with Poetry 