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Poems

tee2emm Feb 2015
You are either black, white or brown.
Not yet, don't frown at this myopic poem
It's just a momentary flicker of thoughts
Read till its home
Else don't dare judge.

I was saying,
When you look, this is what you may see.
People come in black, white and brown shading
At least, that's what the eyes reveal
So our treatment of each other follow these same shadings;
Black, white and brown.

"Blacks are dubious and evil
Whites are righteous, just a little corny
Browns are drug lords and...... something," don't ask me.

Racial conflict
Each struggling to be distinct
Superiority tussle
Utter show of psychological and mental muscle.
Complexity expunging simplicity
Even the weaver-spider is now entangled in its weaving.

If we will but wear our true and innocent eyes,
Everything we look perfect and right
But we have all lost our minds
Even flat grounds now makeĀ  tedious climb.

We are neither blacks, whites nor browns
We are just human beings,
Human beings that are lost
Lost in the refraction of many colours
Same which was designed to make us appreciate each other more.

Now pardon this Radom thoughts
Are we blacks, whites and browns
Or just human beings in different colour shading?
They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen.  They
Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest table.
It was during the long hunger-battle

They found their talent to persevere
In thinness, to come, later,

Into our bad dreams, their menace
Not guns, not abuses,

But a thin silence.
Wrapped in flea-ridded donkey skins,

Empty of complaint, forever
Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn
Scapegoat.  But so thin,

So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,
Could not remain outlandish victims

In the contracted country of the head
Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

Keep from cutting fat meat
Out of the side of the generous moon when it

Set foot nightly in her yard
Until her knife had pared

The moon to a rind of little light.
Now the thin people do not obliterate

Themselves as the dawn
Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline

Of the world comes clear and fills with color.
They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales
Under their thin-lipped smiles,

Their withering kingship.
How they prop each other up!

We own no wilderness rich and deep enough
For stronghold against their stiff

Battalions.  See, how the tree boles flatten
And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

And grayer; not even moving their bones.