I feel it deep inside my heart

I feel it deep inside my heart

This dispossession that tore you apart

From your land and your loved ones

And leads now to your race

Being the most highly incarcerated

By percentage on earth

When I feel how it was for you

To be over run and dispossessed

To have your language nearly entirely eradicated

For your women to suffer

Under the power of white men

For your children to be stolen

My blood boils

And then for there to be

A silencing

And need for us to recognise

Your claim to a voice

In this a land

We never owed

But only stole

It truly makes me cry

Tears tinged with the taste of blood

And I remember how they tried to teach me

I was bad

For being myself

And having needs

That didn’t fit in

With their narrow ways

And maybe its just this echo

That makes me feel the pain

But then I remember how

At first sighting of Uluru

Appearing lavender under a late dawn sky

I wept again

Finally feeling where the true heart of this country lay

While knowing myself to be so very very far away

From the true land of my ancestors

It was then I realised that something went so very wrong

And yet it had to be

The way it was

And in the schism this knowledge awoke

I foundered

Am foundering still

As tears still fall for the state of us

While I pray that in time

We will find a way to truly recognise

What was done

And the pain it caused

For until then

My heart will not fully rest

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/boyer-lecture-2019-rachel-perkins