Emily Barker: ‘Oodgeroo’

Oodgeroo

Oodgeroo (paperbark tree, rooted in her name)
blows her burdened words,
out from under the shade of a white alias.

A cyclone breath of black butterflies
whisk over neon blue and rust
as the skin of Australia peels back.

A continent’s worth of dust rises,
an empire’s worth of buried voices
become storm.

Sentences scratch at the borders of exile.
The paperbark sheds her pages,
letters arranged on painted placards,

in poems, speeches—anywhere words will grow.
Shoved under closed doors, shouted down paved streets.
A demand: read me as a citizen of my own country!

Cocooned in her name, Oodgeroo’s ink
finds home before blood or bone
in print across the red-dirt nation.

But where are those words now
that spelt their way to freedom?
No refuge in school book or upon shelf.

You have to dig, deeper than you ought,
to where the water table rises and the dirt turns wet.
There, her words lap at the roots of the ghostly paperbark

read me, read me, read me.

Emily…