The unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist. — D. M. Thomas
All over the camps / children’s eyes / revolve inwards / like moons
Their muscles wane / as minds release / cruel world
They scored their grief with razors / they lit their flesh / like flares
But now their knees lie still / as metaphor / for resignation
Behind fences / limbs grow thin / enough to slip / through loopholes
Force feeding tubes tether / life to life
Judges sanction portals / mothers’ bodies flail glass
Porous eyelids gauge / time to retire
First thirst / then speech / then sight / then sense expire
Beneath the ice / you wend the blank / pathways of your mind
Your body / crossing borders / liquefied
Withdrawn / so far / so far / so far / inside
What interim world are you hiding in?
In dreams / I hear you calling / with the voice of my own child
I keep turning vacant corners / looking
For liminal beings / lost little ones / my loves
*Resignation Syndrome is a rare psychiatric condition experienced by refugee children in Sweden and now by children detained on Nauru, who withdraw, as a result of trauma, into an unconscious state