The Settling
They came in with their governments, their guns and their greed
They stripped us of our power
Raping our lands
Pillaging our people
They brought their rules and their boundaries
Their status and their roles
They told us ‘You are called this’
‘You are called that’
‘Your way is wrong!’
‘Our way is right!’
‘Let us show you the way’
They said
‘We’ll show you what it means to be civilized’
They burned our beliefs and placed a book in our hands
‘This is God’ they said
‘Praise him, Love him’
Soon we started listening
We started believing
We started forgetting who we were before they had come to our lands
Soon barely anyone remembered that past and who we once were
We followed orders
We copied how they acted, what they said, how they dressed
But soon we began to question why we had no say in our lands
In our people
Our questions grew to voices
And those voices grew louder and louder
The noise grew to fighting
To rising
Before they retreated
Surrendered
Gave up
We were a lost cause
Even we knew that
We looked at our lands left in turmoil
Our people confused and mismatched with remnants of our past and bits of the present that had been forced upon us
Who are we?
What do we do now?
No comments:
Post a Comment