#1121 - poem on Amnesia Day - acknowledge

 

26.i.23

1121

4.26

poem on Amnesia Day

 

isn’t this the day of our making

the undoing day

a day to face the facts

tell truth

?

 

 

acknowledge…

 

let’s…

that this is a stolen place

there’s no treaty

 

we’re all thieves

amends have not been made

 

this isn’t a bleeding heart

this isn’t a black armband

 

simply fact

 

let’s acknowledge

that we are where and whom we are

we are the descendants of dispossession

whatever else we are

 

let’s acknowledge

that everyone who hears and understands these words

has received the gift

and bears the burden

of invasion

 

let’s acknowledge 60,000 years, more

before guns and flags

and fences and owning

before police and lockups and custody

 

let’s acknowledge the hundreds of languages lost

let’s acknowledge the ones that remain

and their speakers

 

let’s acknowledge culture, the sacred

let’s protect

 

acknowledge

what we have done to the place

good bad indifferent

 

acknowledge that everyone came on a boat

plains may have been boundless once

 

let’s acknowledge if we dig up all the coal there is

to ship and burn

that’s it for breathing

what good the profits and taxes then?

 

let’s acknowledge

60,000 years of wallaby fear

few predators before

 

let’s acknowledge that there is no going back

(so many of us ran from terrors

and many still today)

 

let’s acknowledge the amnesia

 

how we came and why

by what right

 

the hell of the voyage

how so few chose to be here to begin

 

let’s acknowledge

some cloven hoof damage

 

how ill mannered we have been

in our great home invasion

with every weapon so disposed

 

how unkind we’ve been to eat the others

to cage them

 

the lash and the chains and the poison

 

let’s acknowledge ourselves the unnatural disaster

part of nature yet

 

the vicious wrong of this we

let’s acknowledge

the blind eye, the wink

 

we all to vanish

all doings done

this world as well

 

let’s acknowledge the fact

 

luck and unluck

 

that we are the complication

 

the creatures!

how each year fewer in kind

 

an anger should point to justice

tell truth

 

let’s acknowledge how each of us is many

and still more stories to tell

 

rote words mean less and less

no one listens

we all must come from the heart to here

 

must love the land

must make a home

 

let’s acknowledge that this is where we are now

that we have to tell the truth

to live with ourselves

we have to make this right