Your poems make me feel like a refugee
cut off from my homeland by some nondescript disaster.
The start of some new war, perhaps?
The ending of another?
I wonder if it matters – either way, the way is shut.
Now I must raise my children from this plot of bloody ochre.
Can you make a house a home
if you stole the land it stands on?
I promise I’ll be grateful – God knows I have no choice.
We’ve all seen what they do to those who don’t agree to grovel.
My son will learn your alphabet; I’ll shoulder your traditions.
I’ll make my customs edible and highly photogenic.
I’ll be a model citizen, and tolerate your tolerance –
I’m sure we’ll learn to rub along just fine.
But every time I read about your eucalypts and flyscreens
and see you waxing lyrical for some suburban memory
I hear my spirit whispering:
This is not my land.
We know I’ll never show it; there is no greater trespass here
than flinching from the fingers of the hand that gave you succour.
Recoiling means inviting down a hail of flagellation
the punishment reserved for the different and ungrateful.
And then the final knockout – my family inheritance:
Why don’t you go back to where you came from?
But home is not a place we left.
It’s something we were ripped from.
Chiselled off its surface
by the batterings of fate.
And how like you, to misconstrue my apathy as hatred
as though I have to love a thing to comprehend its purpose.
I know the words are music, but the meaning is beyond me;
You pulled them from a story I will never understand.
Because you are not my people.
And this is not my land.
Kyogle Writers Festival acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land and waters on which we work and live. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
Signup to receive news:
Signup to receive news: