Christmas Island

There's an Angel of Mercy where Christ boils his billy
looks over the waters and beckons to me
And the cliff tops all sparkle, and tinkle and twinkle
with tinsel and bells and such sweet liberty

And they suffer the poor, the wretched the hungry
and the lamp light will welcome a lost refugee.  

The country I come from is silent and broken,  
the songlines forsaken our colour expunged.
Our speech is in wires that burn in the white light,
our thoughts are the whispers of words on the run.

The song of the ocean is soft and beguiling
an insistent lover it calls through the night
Come sail on my breast I bring hope to the hopeless
Come sail on my breast through the dark to the light

They suffer the poor there, the wretched the hungry
and a porch light will glow for a sad refugee.

A sullen flotilla slips out on the river

it aches with this commerce of humankind.

And who among you would huddle in place there

as one after one they come and they come

with fear of the jolt, and the clump and the roll

as the fates bestir and the balance tips
and a pitch on the axis turns hope into horror 

in this endless procession of future eclipsed?

Out on the island Christmas is dead, the Child
stillborn and those signs whip and crack:
Stop The Boats. Turn Them Around. Send Them Back.
Christ sups his tea.  Suffer the sacred, the children who come.