I Am A Human Being

Before your ink dried on the map, I was country.
Before your God named the light, I read the stars.
Before your flags were planted in my soil like wounds,
I was sovereign – and I am sovereign still.

You named me savage so you could sleep at night.
You built your cities on the bones of my silence.
But silence is not surrender. Hear me now –
my humanity was never yours to grant or withhold.

My father walked Erambie under the weight of policy,
his dignity intact beneath every indignity they devised.
They called it a mission. He called it home.
The difference between those two words is a century of theft.

Do not bring me your pity dressed up as progress.
Do not audit my suffering against your conscience.
I am not your burden. I am not your lesson.
I am the witness your archive was built to forget.

You want me grateful for the scraps of recognition –
a welcome to country before the real business begins.
I want the business to stop. I want the land returned.
I want my children to grow without inheriting shame.

The Dreaming did not end when Cook’s shadow fell on the shore.
The Law did not break when your law declared it broken.
Sixty-five thousand years do not dissolve in two centuries –
we are the deep time your short memory cannot hold.

Call me what you’ve called me. I have outlived every word.
Primitive. Problem. Welfare case. Urban black.
Each one a cage you built – I walked out wearing the bars as ornament.
I am still here. That alone should give you pause.

The rights you wrote in ink – they were always mine.
The dignity you carved in stone – it was never your gift to give.
Not as exception. Not as afterthought. Not as quota met.
But fully, without footnote, without asterisk, without thanks.

I do not need your history books to tell me who I am.
I carry knowledge older than your oldest institution.
I am the river that ran before you named it.
I am the fire your country has forgotten how to bear.

So look at me. Not through me. Not past me. At me.
I am Wiradjuri – and I am a human being.
Both truths at once. No hierarchy between them.
Owe me the respect you would owe yourself –
because we are made of the same grief, the same fire,
the same ancient need to be seen, to be named, to belong.

© Bakchos 2026 | Blak and Black est. 2010