Rain falls on the tin roof

I sit in the cold with a cigarette

Your voice calls as if from the green mountains

Your guitar plays

plucking notes from your homeland

though it is the heat of Manus Island that caresses your skin.

You sing my love

You sing your freedom

Your longing

A gift for me

I am alone listening

to your song

trilling against the wash of the Pacific Ocean.

Your guitar strums the triumph of a freedom yet to come

Your voice sings as a bird rising from the earth

I can do nothing but blaze in the beauty of this

In the beauty of your unlikely music.

Your song

plucked from a cage

bursts over the oceans

arriving like rain on a tin roof.