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From Luke’s Journal Sept 2025 | Vol. 30 No. 2 | Success-Failure

This poem was inspired by an insider’s perspective of what was going on in an Australian hospital.

We saw you upon the hospital screen
when we did not know you,
Your missing forearm was seen
and we did not want you.

We made our beautiful home,
Waiting for the perfect child,
We designed your room especially.
You were created one Summer night
and now we shall abandon you.
You must be our ideal, a child without flaw,
you must be worthy of us
or never enter our doors.

We will protect innocent trees,
We will protect the Great White,
We insured our family Labrador,
But tonight we will let you go,
Being less than what we hoped for
and you will never know.

A thousand laws protecting
the children of our playgrounds,
A thousand vigilant cameras rolling,
We built our child protection army,
They promised to guard your child,
Unless you are an unborn son,
Unless you are an unborn daughter.

We live in the land of shallows,
We are hyper consumers,
We know our rights,
We gag our consciences,
We bury our lives.
In steel denial, we don’t want to know
We don’t wish to ever understand.

We do not see we are the blind,
Conditioned by endless contradiction,
We do not wish to perceive,
the guilt we cannot wash away,
from our hearts and off our hands.

We twist words that cannot change the act,
Foetal termination is not child abuse,
Late term abortion isn’t first-degree murder,
Their lives were less than our legal right –
A waiting bedroom will be empty tonight.

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