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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.
Copyright ©
Faruk Ahmed Roni
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