Good Samaritan Sister Marie Casamento’s poem A clustering plea? is her response to the theme of ‘Belonging’ in the 2025 ACU Prize for Poetry, an initiative of Australian Catholic University.
A clustering plea?
Clustering, clattering chaos,
breaks the jubilant cries
of children playing, clinging together, dancing as one.
Held secure in mums’ laps, enshrined in dads’ powerful arms,
their safety is paramount.
Silence rips security from earth to heaven.
Rubble falls in a shower of bomb-blasted chaos.
Suddenly a small child shrieks, Mumma,
Mumma! Mumma!
His small, blackened hand reaches through the dense smoke.
Dust falls all around.
Devastation frames his weak, waving hand
above his bloodied, dust-strewn face.
A lone survivor is he, it appears,
a minute ago held secure, in a family’s clustering embrace.
And they dare to call this man-made driver of abominable annihilation,
the work, of a cluster bomb.
Jesus, once sat
on a high point in this land;
bent down, and wrote in this soil, making a salve to bathe unseeing eyes.
Jesus’ weeping tears, softened the dust
with hope, salted in a healing gesture;
Crying out “Weep not for me!”
And like a hen gathering chicks,
clustering them beneath her wings, Jesus weeps some more.
All the while, as we stare bewildered, Ali waves, crying incessantly,
Mumma, mumma, mumma.
He waves his blackened hand, hoping against hope to attract attention.
Slowly his blood-streaked face moves
to look agonisingly at me, at you, at us.
Will you also go away?
Will you also pass by on the other side, leave me here to die?
Can you hold my gaze?
Will you who look at me on your TV screens
dare to pass me by?
Mamma,
Mamma please gather me up.
Mumma please
Cluster me up, in your arms!
Hold me close to your warm beating heart.
Alone outside the scene she weeps, his mother,
gazing in love’s anguish at Ali’s broken, bruised body.
While fixing our stunned stares at TV screens world wide,
she cries, sobbing softly,
pleading to us, imploringly,
Will you also pass us by, held complicit,
to walk away on the other side?
Will you also pass us by?
Or will you gather us,
cluster us into the world’s loving embrace.
Our plea, your response is to cluster us together.
Our only hope, your response.
Your only hope, together we can;
We can walk together on the very same side,
the side of humanity.
– Marie Casamento SGS
Published with permission from Australian Catholic University. For information about prizewinners in the 2025 ACU Prize for Poetry, click here.
This poem was republished in the December 2025 edition of The Good Oil.
