We Were Here Before the Borders

They wake before the mist lifts in bamboo huts nailed to the spine of hills, children with feet toughened by stone, learning to climb before they can read. The school a distant building where the teacher comes twice a week, or not at all. Lessons written in a language that does not speak their names. A girl hums an old tune as she carries water from a stream her grandmother says is sacred. Now the water tastes of metal. They do not ask why they are used to not being answered. At the clinic, a mother waits with a fevered child. She counts the cracks on the wall instead of medicines. The nurse says, “We are out of stock,” as if health is a seasonal crop. Once they owned the forest like breath owns the body. Now, papers come with stamps and numbers, men in uniforms draw invisible lines through ancestral soil, and call it development. At night, they gather not to protest, but to remember. Around the fire, the elders whisper stories that the government does not archive. They are not asking for your mercy. They are asking for memory. Recognition. The right to name their pain. They are not gone. They are not voiceless. They are singing still in a tongue that echoes through trees you no longer hear.