Emptied Spaces/Filled Places — Filled Spaces/Emptied Places.
Some days this place seems like a skeleton now, ossified bones of a stone fossil giant, bones left exposed, eroded of meaning, and everywhere I look there are remnants — Those vast spaces, vacant places, the echoing emptiness and absences.
Everywhere scattered littered fragments of what was here once, and those memories of peoples stories, stories that echoed through the land, along the curved ribboned grey blue slated streets with rain shone and silvered rooves. And our stories told again and told again, of the beginnings by families in all the stone cut tidy little homes. Stories handed down — stories handed on, stories of our family’s journey, of all our families’ journey. I was a small child, so young then, open mouthed, open eyed.
Agape with wonderment, asking for the story to be told once more and again, it’s painful to know the stories of the journey are no longer shared, only that pitiless silence. And so we are the bearers, the holders of this knowledge, of our families names, of the stories of our people, of what happened to them on that day. On that day. Or of what took them away. We have no laments, or folk songs of our people’s migrant memories, only jumbled film clips, silent sepia photographs, fragments again.
