More from our Virtual Writer in Residence: Claire Kearns

This Spring, Melbourne writer Claire Kearns has been holding a virtual residency at Bookbag.

For her second piece, and mindful of the wars raging, Claire shares her research into war trophies, and the resulting political imprint these trophies leave on the living history of Country. The poem highlights the Wannon, a river that flows through Indigenous land in Victoria, Australia. You can read this moving poem Silence in The Glass Cabinet below. 

Silence in the Glass Cabinet: things they took from Country

By Claire Kearns

The river does not argue.
It moves past the fence line,
past places where objects stand
counting what is carried.

The Wannon keeps its own record
in reed beds,
In the valley below Mud-Dadjug
where fog holds,
longer than it should.

They took things that did not belong to them.
Metal from the river.
Stone from the ground.
Names.
Stories that were not theirs.

They called them trophies.
Polished the word,
until it shone like impudence.

Or the brass we fought for.

By the time the trophies reached the cabinet
They had learned silence.
Pinned to felt.
Numbered.
Measured by accession ink.

Behind glass,
The light is controlled.
No wind.
No river-sound.
No ash drifting from our fire.

A label explains
in careful institutional grammar.
Acquired.
Collected.
Donated.

Nothing there says
how Country felt after.

Nothing there says
how Country notices absence.

The Wannon still runs its length
without permission.
It touches every bank
It remembers.

At dusk, the river goes dark first,
holding the sky’s last light
under its surface
keeping stories safe.

The cabinet does not know this.
It cannot hear water against stone.
It cannot feel stones cooling
after heat.

The river knows what was stolen.
It moves around the loss
without conceding it.

And in the Victoria Valley
where mist settles low and patient,
Country keeps speaking.
not loudly,
not for them.

in a current
that does not forget
but does forgive
the hand
that closed
and carried

to the glass cabinet.