Blak Tea

Their map folds

over fault lines stitched with our silence.

No one marks the place

where our stories went missing—

where bushfires ate

what remains of our names.

Grandmother’s river

dammed with concrete,

bones of blak sistas

curled in forgotten beds,

slivered ochre, flaked

off rockfaces by the boot heel

of a white man’s ambition.

The trees here—scribbly gums

hollowed by absence—

cradle their own histories,

none of them written,

except in the tremble of wind through branches

that cannot forget.

Do you see how the suburb

sprawls, growing like a cancer,

over middens—the landfill of memory?

The old mob, bulldosed,

buried under carparks 

and shimmering heat.

The graves with no headstones,

where laughter and ceremony

once wove through grass?

We keep singing country,

though asphalt chokes the old songlines.

We plant gardens in haunted, 

blood soaked earth,

tend yams in shadow

of shopping centers,

speak a language

that linguists call “lost”.

Every time a child asks

what this land means,

I gather fragments.

A feather from the crow,

bitter smoke from last week’s grassfire,

chunks of old stone—

and I try, in my way, to piece

a belonging that will not

be unmade.