Gordon Ferris is a sixty-two old year Dublin writer living in Ballyshannon in Co Donegal for the past thirty-six years. He is a member of the Dublin Writers Forum and has had poetry and short stories published in A New Ulster, Hidden Channel and The Galway Review. Most in A New Ulster.

Questions

In broken English
“thank you so much, you enjoy your day sir.”
Earnest and heartfelt
beauty and a joy for life in her eyes.
 
what horrors has she left behind
in her homeland
to have such joy
at now just living.
 
She travelled across treacherous seas
suffering many humiliations,
degraded beyond what
any human should endure.
 
Why should the words
of any God Warbler
induce you to kneel before them
When you witness what’s done in its name.
 
I wonder if a world
with no lines dividing
or doctrine guiding
 
only steered by
what’s already inside us.
and what, by instinct, we know.
 
Would they still have
to leave their land
abandoning all they know
 
Would they still
Have to live the nightmare
Of lost hearts in a distant land.