Why I don’t write about refugees
 
No doubt it’s well meant but their Dachau-dark stories
are beyond even our fecund imagination,
so, attempts at writing them are mere ventriloquism.
As exploitative perhaps, as the traffickers
who sell promises at premium rates. 
Our duty is to bear the rub of our own impotence,
watching from sofas the squalor of camps where inmates
with empty faces live in the awful limbo of now.
And as the TV news dishes up with dinner, the shocking
scramble for boats designed for pleasure, not plight,
it should be too much for our conscience to swallow.
Better to wait for their voices to be restored
and memories recovered so they can tell their own tales,
albeit in a borrowed tongue.

Fiona Sinclair
 
If you have any thoughts on this poem, Fiona Sinclair would be pleased to hear them.