Understand Old One - Analysis

An imagined return that measures loss

The poem’s central move is to summon an Old One—an ancestor—and ask them to look at what has replaced their home. The question What if you came back now isn’t idle curiosity; it’s a test that exposes how violently the place has been remade. By calling the present our new world while also insisting on the old peaceful camping place, the speaker holds two ownerships in the same breath: the Indigenous past that belongs here, and the imposed modern present that has arrived on top of it.

From quiet water to a city that roar[s]

The strongest contrast is sensory. The earlier scene is intimate and grounded: red fires by quiet water, a peaceful camp. Against that, the city is animal and loud—roaring—as if it can’t help but drown out what came before. The tone carries grief without saying grief outright: the poem mourns the erasure by making the old scene feel calm, human-scaled, and knowable, then making the new one feel overwhelming.

Stone gunyas: naming the skyscraper as a strange shelter

One of the poem’s most loaded images is towering stone gunyas high in air. A gunya is traditionally a shelter; attaching the word to skyscrapers is both bitterly witty and quietly defiant. It translates the city into Indigenous terms, but the translation doesn’t domesticate it—it makes it look unnatural: shelters shouldn’t be towering, immense, incredible, suspended high in air. The speaker’s choice of language suggests a tension between recognition and alienation: the Old One might try to understand these structures as dwellings, yet their scale and material make them feel like an insult to the older way of living with place.

Wonder that doesn’t quite mean admiration

The poem says How you would wonder, but it’s a sharpened kind of wonder, edged with disbelief. The final images—Planes in the sky over and swarms of cars—make modern motion look insect-like and panicked, Like things frantic in flight. That simile tips the tone: what could be read as technological triumph becomes something mindless and driven, an agitation that has replaced the steady quiet water. The contradiction is the poem’s pressure point: the new world is spectacular, even incredible, but it’s also frantic, and it exists precisely where the red fires used to burn.

The harder question beneath the question

If the Old One returned and stood on that old peaceful camping place, would they be able to recognize it at all—or would the roaring city mean that the place has been taken not only in land but in memory? The poem’s imagined reunion implies a judgment: not just look what we built, but look what we built it on.