[As usual, having been messing about with a poem, I decided to post the first draft here
Comments, criticisms and suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks.]
Asylum
Come on in, take a seat and don’t make a sound. We’ll give the help you need, to return to where you’ll bleed on someone else’s ground. Is that a child at your skirt, with her eyes blazing hurt? Well that will never do. Theres a doorway over there, it’s wet and stormy and you're scared, but it’s the best that we can do.
Did you think that we would care? Did you think we’d lay it bare? For a sufferer like you? Tell your story in your sleep, there are rules we need to keep, we have our own problems too. We can hurt you if we want, we can hold you to account, for the way that you arrived and the troubles you can count.
Tell me again, what they did to your men, when they stormed through the night. We’ll file it and say you’re a liar and anyway, you left it too late. Did your son survive? Is your sister alive? Prove your pain to us now, are those tears in your eyes? Now tell us again, how many of them, did not survive?
Can you show us some scars? Can you prove who you are? Did you think we would take it on faith? You’re thin as a whip, you look dead and you sit like a long forgotten wraith. And your eyes hold the colour of all that you lost, your shoulders weighed with the unbearable cost, of how you got away.
We’ve reached our conclusion. Your scars aren’t enough, we’re sending you home, your story’s a bluff. The rapes never happened, the death toll’s a lie, no one was tortured, nobody died. You never were married, your son never lived, your sister’s made up and the names that you give don’t exist.
It’s five in the morning. The runway is cold. Your little girl’s crying, from eyes that look old. The men who brought you, were rough and unkind, they bruised you and dragged you and paid no mind to the tears of your just-wakened child. You wipe her eyes now, pull her red rain-coat tight and tell her, you’ll make it all right.