Robin Metcalfe

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  • Home
  • Odd Man Out
    • Blog
  • Writing
    • Prose >
      • Sometimes a headscarf is just a headscarf
    • Poetry >
      • cranberries
      • don't blame it on the weather
      • Remembrance Day 2016
      • unsettled
  • Exhibitions
    • Léopold L Foulem : Récupérations
  • Queer
    • History >
      • Invention & Emancipation
      • Weimar & After
    • Activism
    • Pink Triangle Day >
      • History
  • Albums
    • Passage
  • About
    • Acknowledgement
    • Bio
  • Contact

unsettled


the land here was
levelled
before the house was built

the trees felled
the ground bulldozed
burying the home burrows
of those who lived here
the mice and
bees and
beetles

we settlers call that
development


today
the flags are lowered
after the bodies of
two hundred and fifteen
Indigenous children
were found buried
on the grounds of a residential school
in Kamloops
in the land of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc


today
a century ago
a white mob
wearing police badges
burned down the hopes
of Greenwood
Tulsa, Oklahoma

levelling
thirty-five blocks of homes
and schools
and businesses
built by the ten thousand Black residents

the number of dead
unknown
but in the hundreds


we have called the land
real estate
as it settled
over the bodies


today
on Turtle Island
survivors use
ground-penetrating radar
to try to read the earth
beneath a century
of silence
and call the lost names
of the dead


the news today
to say the least is
unsettling

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