I have seen a country
where hunger wears clean shoes in one room
and no shoes at all in the next.
I have seen children learn the shape of silence
before they learn the shape of a pencil.
I have seen mothers carry what can’t be carried,
folded into grocery bags,
folded into old sweaters,
folded into the kind of hope
that does not ask to be thanked.
And I have seen this same wound
from the prairie to the port city,
from the reservation road
to the far bright markets of the world —
a long, long ledger of the taken,
the overlooked,
the counted only when it is time to count the dead.
But listen:
I do not say this to sharpen a blade.
I say it because the heart still breaks
before it learns how to hate.
I say it because even now
a hand can still reach across the dark
without asking who deserves it.
There are people in this world
who have been made to feel invisible
for so long
they begin to disappear in daylight.
There are people in this world
who keep their dignity
the way a match keeps its flame
in a wind that should have blown it out.
And I have looked into that wind.
I have stood in it.
I have seen the torn hem of the human family
and I am telling you —
we are not separate stories.
We are one body
learning, too slowly,
how to stop bleeding on its own.
So if there is any mercy left in us,
let it be this:
to see one another fully,
to feed one another without shame,
to grieve one another without distance,
and to remember
that a little kindness
is not little
to the person who is almost gone.