Bora Ring
Bora Ring - meaning Summary
Ritual and Dispossession
Wright's Bora Ring registers the erasure of Indigenous ceremony and presence after colonization. Rituals and hunters have vanished; landscape and trees only faintly echo former corroborees. The poem frames this disappearance as both cultural loss and a haunting legacy. The modern observer feels sudden, inherited guilt and fear, linked to an ancient curse evoked by the poem and implying moral responsibility for that silence.
Read Complete AnalysesThe song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal story lost in an alien tale. Only the grass stands up to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums posture and mime past corroboree, murmur a broken chant. The hunter is gone; the spear is splintered underground, the painted bodies a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot. The nomad feet are still. Only the rider's heart halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word that fastens in the blood of the ancient curse, the fear as old as Cain.
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