Talk With Me: Never, Never
Talk With Me, a national writing competition for secondary school students, is run by the Petone Settlers Museum in association with the Department of Labour and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was first run in 2006 alongside a major exhibition Walk with Me: the Refugee Experience in New Zealand.This is Juliette Varuhas’s winning entry.
Never, Never
Juliette Varuhas, 14, Wellington Girls’ College
A dead sinking land
Written on history’s grains of sand
A country stained forever
Because of war’s endeavour
Music, of gunfire and drum beets
War’s melody haunts our rubble streets
But to this country my name is penned
Penned on my heart till my dying end
To see my home free at last
A hope of the distant past
Never, Never
A hemisphere of smoke, red and black
Light never escapes, not even through a crack
Which weapon will kill us faster?
From war’s pallet of disaster
Young and old slaughtered
Women and men, hung drawn and quartered
Dusty eyes fall forever
Trees that bleed, they sever
To be solved on the wings of negotiation?
No, in the fires of confrontation
Terror, Terror
Camps of sickness, stench and stale food
Accompany my emotional solitude
Survivors with limbs blown away
Live to suffer another day
Others like I believe
We will never leave
What did I wrong what was my fault?
That happiness should exclude me from its cult
Forever, Forever
Never equal, never right
Now I’m to merge into the plague of white
A new country young and free
No need to be afraid, no need to flee
But there is a price, my debt to pay
To be alive this day
People are polite but never warm
Happiness has never taken form
Will I be equal, will I be right?
Or will I just stain the white?
Never, Never
Check out the other two winners’ pieces: Kate Brooks’s ‘Kifah’ - struggle and Nosia Fogogo’s Happiness is Ubiquitous.
