This week is Refugee Week. Inย Under the Same Sky, I try to express the language we use around displacementโthe polite refusals, the tidy phrases that hide something harder underneath.
Under The Same Sky
Oh no, not another refugee
wanting to be free
go somewhere else
canโt you see
weโre full
there is no room at the inn
pardon the biblical quote
but take note
we understand how you feel
underneath a shared sky
we live
where it rains through a sieve
and on others it pours
no land to own
no seeds get sown
in a flood
no flowers bloom
nothing comes to bud
sorry mโlud
but
we donโt have room
โLesley Scoble, June 2026
Audio โ Under The Same Sky, narrated by me
The Voice of Rohingya
Iโd like to introduce you to a new blogger on the block. Anowar Sadak has been living with his family in the worldโs largest refugee camp in Bangladesh since 2017, alongside more than 1.3 million Rohingya refugees. I read his first blog post and was deeply moved.
Anowarโs photograph below shows โtwo refugees carrying an elderly sick woman on a wooden chair to an NGO healthcare centre inside the camp.โ (No ambulance to call. No 999 or 911 number to dial.)
Please take a look at his new site, Voice of Rohingya. Iโm looking forward to seeing more posts from him, and I hope some will include his fine poetry.
Refugees by Brian Bilston
I recently read this reverse poem by Brian Bilston and thought it was pretty brilliant. His use of the form is so clever in how it reveals a second point of view when read in reverse.
Afterword
My poem was first inspired by Melissaโs Fandango Short Fiction Challenge #378, with the image by Markus Spiske. It also responds to W3 Prompt #217, Beneath the Surface, devised by Sally, the PoetโofโtheโWeek. You can read her full prompt guidelines below.
Sallyโs prompt: Beneath the surface
Iโve been spending a lot of time lately trying to weed the gardens around my house. By the time I finish my daily stint, I usually have dirt on my hands and under my fingernails. Along the way, I uncover worms that seem startled by the light, insects that scurry off to find a new hiding place, and a house wren who scolds me endlessly because she has taken up residence in the birdhouse nearby. Then there are the thorny plants that leave me bleeding when I grab them without paying attentionโand make me wish Iโd worn the gardening gloves I bought but rarely use because theyโre so clumsy and awkward.
All of this got me thinking about gardens, dirt, worms, roots, weeds, and the many things that lie beneath the surface.
You can take this prompt literally and write about gardening or the natural world. Or you can use these images as metaphors for growth, change, discovery, hidden truths, difficult work, things that need tending, or anything else they inspire.
Wherever your imagination takes you, I hope youโll dig around a bit and see what you uncover.
- Form: Any form
- Length: Up to 14 lines (oops, my poem exceeds this by 7 lines)
Acknowledgements
Enormous thanks to Melissa Lemayโs photo prompt for inspiring the theme of my poem, and to Sally and the W3 Prompt for encouraging me to โdig deeperโ.
My thanks as always to David, The Skeptics Kaddish.
My thanks to Anowar Sadak for his kind permission to use his photograph.
My thanks also to Brian Bilston, a poet whom I admire, for his poem โRefugeesโ.
And last but not least, thank you, the reader, for being here.
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