When the white girl reads the black poem

She is,

Dangerous

Reckless,

Brave, progressive,

Aggressive,

Like a dog who has just discovered how to remove

Her muzzle

She’ll stand here,

Behind microphone shields

She yields,

Her pen

Armed with poetry,

She speaks in tongues weaponised,

With freedom of speech

Each word

Pinpointing the politics

Of her own

White-washed ways

She’ll be deemed,

The ‘white girl who cares’

But I’m just a white girl who stared,

At the pages of a history book

That shouldn’t belong to me,

What is the point of believing,

The world is black and white,

If you only ever get to read

One side to the story

But that’s just white history,

We say we’re for equality,

But we are equally,

Fretting about what the media sees

White girl thinks she’s heroic,

Getting to cherry pick

Which Black voices make the screen,

Make a scene,

One headline invites our black fullas,

To ‘take a seat’

White Australia’s advocacy

For racism

Get that like, tick that box,

Then erase them,

Next time, news time says,

Black youth are terrorising towns,

Yeah, well we terrorised continents,

Take welcome to country,

As a compliment

Say yes to a voice in our government,

Get coverage,

Of stories

As colourful

As the rainbow serpent

But that doesn’t happen does it?

NO,

The campaigns screamed,

For sovereignty never ceded

Yeah, but we did,

YES,

Was a chance to redeem it, to plead forgiveness, because we’ve just figured,

That maybe, white girl’s voice

Has been speaking for too long,

Singing another colour’s song

Taking up space on a stage

Where she doesn’t belong

But where is the line drawn?

Between white girl sticking up for black fullas

And white girl being wrong?