Gabrielle de Gray, San Francisco bay area, USA
continually occupied
by aboriginal people since the last ice age
46,000 years of culture
contained inside a cave of dreamers
a braid excavated
4,000 years old— its woven strands bound loosely a direct ancestor
archeologists found
7000 artifacts in a terroir full of bone
to include
a 28,000-year-old kangaroo femur sharpened into a pointed tool
generations of living memory
held inside the land
blown up
for Rio Tinto to mine 8 million tons of ore
executives chose
to go straight through the site and not around
an additional
$135 million in company profit
the colonial narrative
has been replaced
by the narrative
of corporations
the ripple of history continues
until one day
we will arrive
at a place beyond the language of words
that cannot be found on a map
but inside the interiority of human experience
between the spoken and silent places
inside the sound of memory which holds the loss of forgotten things
*Juukan Gorge was destroyed in Australia by the Rio Tinto Mining Corporation— May 24th, 2020.
Gabrielle de Gray is a writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been published in the New York Times, Chesapeake Review, The Mindful Word, and Yellow Arrow Literary Magazine. She holds an MA from the University of Toronto and is currently at work on a memoir.