A postcard from Christmas Island

Not waving but drowning
- a poem for the refugee children - the victims

We fell with our fear
To the sea
And the waters reformed
Over our breakage
As a body wholly reformed
And we were covered
With structures of wreckage
Washed under the swirls of the gulls
On the sea
That are not our own gulls
Though we harboured the sound
Of the cry in their songs
And tried for the glide of their wings;
The sea does not ask
If we want to be
Once more in the sea
For it seems just as we
Were under the sky
So it must be in the sea
That our spirits may rise
Through the squawks
And the glides
In the quest for the promised above.
______
gw2010

title of the above poem from a poem by Stevie Smith (1902-1971)