Could you ever pretend to understand living in a world that gave you no shelter from the coarse wind of history and the coarser rain of rhetoric?
The shambles of those walls offer no protection. But, after all, they say why do you need walls in the jungle?
No one has to tell you out loud that you were born to be thrown away. The ache of rotting teeth, the feeble acquiescence to raw sewage, and the 400 dollar offer to silence the poison in your veins. They were loud enough.
I imagine there is a moment between doorless stalls and postless football fields, where children, who grow like wild daffodils, see the other side of the bridge. And then they know until the end, that it has always been someone’s choice.
*Referenced from Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Jonathan Kozol, 1991. Chapter 1: Life on the Mississippi: East St. Louis, Illinois.