Before the day begins,
when the city still holds its breath,
I walk on ground
that remembers other footsteps –
long before roads and fences,
before this place was claimed by other names,
when stories ran with the water
and nobody needed a deed to belong.
We wake now on concrete,
in houses stacked like boxes,
the river renamed, sealed in canals,
our footprints pressed under parking lots.
Ancestral soil
churns beneath a luxury mall.
We wear school uniforms stitched with foreign crests,
walk corridors hung with pale faces,
lips taut with rules not made for us.
Our tongue, a forbidden music,
slides home in secret or in dreams.
There are monuments everywhere,
bronzed men on horses,
stone tablets where blood once spilled.
History in tourist plaques,
silent on how we vanished and persisted.
I visit my grandmother on Sundays,
her eyes clouded by time,
her voice clear as the wetlands she crossed as a girl.
She recounts the stories
that refuse to die:
fire at the base of every family tree.
Even the land grieves its loss;
trees felled, water poisoned,
emblems raised that do not sing our belonging.
Dispossessed, we walk the boundaries
of our own lives — fragile inheritances,
worn tired by always holding on.
In the city, I move between shadows,
my skin a worn map of country taken,
without offering.
I see our youth,
stopped, searched, spoken over,
the old script still playing.
What is vulnerability,
when survival itself is defiance?
We gather strength from protest, from dance, from scar.
Each reclaiming:
a difficult bloom under broken pavement.
Yet still, the ache of absence:
names erased, absence in the land and the law,
the weight of stories we are not allowed to tell
without contest,
each generation pressing the edges,
widening the breath.
At night, I listen for ancestors in the wind,
the low hum at the city’s edge.
Somewhere, their language moves through the gum leaves.
I plant my feet in solid earth,
rooted in all that was taken
and still, somehow, remains.
