She Speaks, But No One Listens: A Lament of the Old Country

I am old.

Older than the names they gave me,
older than the flags they drove into my skin,
older than the stories they told each other
in the dark, about what I was
before they came.

I have held glaciers.
I have watched seas climb my ribs and fall back.
I have felt the first fires of the first people
read me to the stars.

— — —
Now I hold something else —

the weight of men in suits
who have never once looked down
at the ground beneath their feet
and felt what they were standing on.

They come with drills and quarterly reports.
They open me like a filing cabinet,
take what they need,
ship it east, ship it west,
ship it to whoever signs the invoice —

and in the parliament buildings
someone orders another bottle
and calls this prosperity.

My gas — my ancient breath,
held a hundred million years —
sold at a discount
to keep a lobbyist in oysters,
a donor’s yacht
at the right marina,
a minister comfortable in Canberra.

No one asked me.
No one ever asks me.

— — —
My cities fill at the bottom
with the ones who fell
and found no net below them.

They sleep in my doorways.
They eat from my bins.
They are my children too —

and the careful man
commissions a review.

It will report.
There will be findings.
There will be a response.
The doorways will still be full.

— — —
The other one holds press conferences
in the dry bed of a river
and calls it a platform.

He reads the weather
but cannot feel the wind.
He has mistaken the smell of rain
for the rain itself
so many times
that now, when the rain comes,
he is already indoors
claiming credit for the clouds.

— — —
I felt the anger before they named it.

It came up through the floors of fibro houses
baking in the January west,
through the slab of a driveway
where a car that will not start
has sat since the last pay didn’t stretch,
through the particular weight
of a bill left face-down on a kitchen table
because turning it over
changes nothing
and costs everything.

I felt it rising.
I knew what it was
the way I know drought —
not by its arrival
but by the long silence before.

And then a voice came
that spoke the anger’s name —
not to cool it,
not to ask what had made it,
but to aim it.

To hand it back as fire.

Not light.
Fire.

— — —
The rich are digging me up.
The poor are sleeping on me.
The politicians are managing me.
The lobbyists have my number.

I am old.
I have been here before sunrise,
before the first word spoken
in any language on this earth.

I will be here after all of them.

But I had hoped —

in the way old things sometimes hope
when the light comes again —

I had hoped
that someone would look down,
actually look,
and feel something
other than the price.

© Bakchos, May 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010