Diane Fahey is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently The Light Café (Liquid Amber Press, 2023) and Sanctuaries (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024). She has received various awards and fellowships for her poetry, including the ACT Government’s Judith Wright Prize, and been short-listed for six other major book awards. Her poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, over a period of forty years, and been represented in over 80 anthologies, most recently in Buzz Words and Spellbound (Penguin Random House). Her PhD in Creative Writing from UWS is titled ‘Places and Spaces of the Writing Life.’ <dianefaheypoet.com>
Harm
Their crime: to have embarked
on a sea journey
in search of a safe place.
Most have known oppression,
some, persecution, torture.
The powers that be
marooned them on islands within islands,
where all were mistreated.
There were deaths by suicide
and from other causes.
Those with serious illnesses –
treatment sometimes delayed –
were brought to mainland hospitals
then transferred to
locked, guarded hotels –
look, there’s one just down the road,
looming in grey rectitude:
tacky, unaired, with so many walls.
Ideal places, some must think,
for more uncertain waiting.
*
Unjust incarceration –
the stalling, without cause,
of a human life
left dangling from
a vanishing point
with nowhere to fall.
Unjust incarceration –
of whatever kind,
in whatever setting –
like living through
a terminal illness
designed never to end.
*
Not in my name.
We find ways to protest,
offer prayers of hope
for those incarcerated, still,
beyond these shores
and for those, too,
here now, but ‘pending’ –
deemed provisional citizens,
who await certificates
of belonging.
Hope? I see – or do I? –
a summer field, grasses
sprung from stony earth,
trees in their green strength,
the vibrant air touching
every blade and leaf.
*
For those granted,
after many years,
the tenure of a citizen,
a slow recovery:
each day bringing, perhaps,
some small repair of damage,
each day spent relearning
a lost self,
composing a new one,
each day offering
the gift of time –
a new kind of time.