I stand, arms outstretched as everything i know whirls around me
Smashed into driftwood and debris by the tornado of circumstance
They say justice is blind but I can’t help feel she’s blindfolded right now,
Held to ransom as random injustice rains down on us — and it’s a hot rain,
a muggy rain that sticks in your craw and chokes you with the stench of it.
In a week where we take one step closer to our very own Stasi on our doorstep,
with our newly minted Home Office ready to raise its Aussie combat boots
and place them down ever so gently on the neck of our delicate democracy;
in a week where the ice caps melt inexorably towards a day where they can gambol
on warm shores with scores of dead fish; in a week where the ersatz leader of the
so-called free world slimes his way through yet another woman’s dignity;
in this week, when we need good people so desperately, it is in this week
that we find ourselves bumbling through press conference after press conference
where the sheer unfairness of all of it comes crashing down around my ringing ears
and my numb hands which I find have crept into fists again; my aching shoulders
have found themselves tight around my ears again and my teeth hurt from clenching
and I am numb numb numb because I cannot let myself rage or I will break
I cannot even bring myself to write it down: that we have lost not one but two
of my heroes over such trivial oversights, over such pathetic bureaucratic mishaps —
I find myself bogged down in legal trivia and rail against it like a child. It’s unfair,
It just shouldn’t be happening. No fair. One week after she was born, the law changed.
One week. Surely you get some kind of pass for that, for stating what you did in good faith.
Surely there’s some sort of waiver for babies and children, but there’s the crux of it,
Isn’t it? If we waive the case for these two, we might need to acknowledge the innocence
Of the 179 children we’ve locked away in sticky-hot camps off our shores; we might
Need to let all those American Dreamers claim their rights on that sticky-hot
Florida shore where their parents landed all those decades ago, because it is
All connected, it is all one hot sticky mess, and leads us right back to Dutton and his
Dirty back-room riot where the police force is sleazing up to the military and they’re all
Leering at the hot sleek weapons cache they’re going to get their sticky fingers on next
Because lord knows it’s a pounding coming to anyone who thinks otherwise
And don’t you forget it in a week where we discovered the legacy of men who visit
Evangelist churches just often enough for someone to drink in the sick hot message
That violence is their birthright and we all better learn to submit, amen.
And now I’m sitting at the bottom of that whirlwind, surrounded by fractured life
And the boxes of both my career and my home. The first day of term and
My daughter’s school was on fire, like it knew that there was no point
Trying to educate anyone in a world such as this, crumbling, destroyed
And without its champions.