In Support of the Indigenous Community at the Boorloo Invasion Day Rally Who Were 'Allegedly' (legal/press jargon) Attacked, and in Support of All Indigenous Peoples

Sidestepping

 

Outside the GPO,

Boorloo/Perth.

Midday.

 

Who wants to call

a meeting space

‘Forrest Place’?

 

Site of non-violent

resistance

to settler

thinking.

 

Invasion Day gathering

to affirm the rights

and spirit

of First Nations people.

 

I cross the overpass

from the railway

station, descend

the escalator

 

and walk adjacent

to where, a week ago,

the attacker threw

an improvised

 

explosive device

encased in a Disney sock —

into the heart

of the crowd.

 

Racist nationalism

is the slow emergence

of cause while

continuing its effect.

 

The unexploded

that reaches

and keeps reaching

for casualties,

 

for aftershocks.

Walking adjacent

I try not to sidestep

the distress.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Counterintuitive Ghazal, 26th January, 2022

If I’ve learnt things askew, it feel it’s not because of bad intentions —

rather, I laud the form and am sad if spirit shifts when I make use of it.

 

On a day of trauma for many, a day of mourning a day of anger

at ill-gotten gains, when there are no platitudes, only pain, I call on it.

 

I call on a form of desire with all ‘erotics’ stripped away because

of the greed of one body over others, because of the chasmic longing in it.

 

Third person singular, I locate those items of ongoing occupation,

and they are all around me and I make use of them as I make recourse to it.

 

I don’t for a moment believe that life can be renewed for the oppressed

from the ‘rotting corpse of the settler’ as violent Frantz Fanon would have it.

 

In fact, I see the artists and poets and singers redressing the wrongs

and bringing repair, knowing the gun was the end of justice and not start of it.

 

But Fanon was right about loss of dignity and hope and ongoing mental illness

wrought by the settlers who played their part and excluded or validated it.

 

I laud this form because of its moments linking to moments, its building

out of longing and despair — in the interconnectedness, each couplet unique in it.

 

I feel the trauma of Karla Dickens’s artwork that antiflags and is forever

more than object — January 26, Day of Mourning — and acknowledge it.

 

I am a flagless person but that doesn’t exonerate me. I feel my bare feet burn

on the ground and know it’s more than a reminder. In my weakness I call on it.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Note: for more on Karla Dickens see this article.