This cardboard prison - Jeannie Leane

This cardboard prison they call an archive
is cold, airless and silent as death.
Floor-to-ceiling boxes contain voices
no longer heard yet wailing within
faces no longer seen yet still missing in
a jail of captured snippets, images and memories
among the severed heads and bleached bones
of dismembered bodies tucked tidily away in vaults
and museums and universities of the world
in the name of science
or history or anthropology or
something else trendy at the time
justifying the collection of our bits and pieces —
as the Other.

Reams of records demonstrate how you measured
our heads with every Western yardstick —
examined us through voyeuristic lenses,
scrutinised our children’s fingernails
long under microscopes to find them remarkably pale —
gawked inside vaginas where that rosebud is
pink as pink is pink
despite the otherwise hypothesised differences
between black and white
intellect, industry and capacity to settle.
We are the inmates incarcerated within
cardboard cells where every neatly dotted i,
  and symmetrically crossed t screams out:

                                 Read this Black angst against
                                 these white pages.

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Jeannie Leane (20th century) Australia
Source: 20 Poets, edited by Kent MacCarter, Cordite Books, 2017