When You See Me, What Do You See?

To those who feel abandoned

Constantly searching the night’s sky for a star they can call home

To those who know and understand poverty

Outcast by a society

For the dirt under their nails

The fetid smell that lingers after they have left

For being uneducated

For being a circumstance of poor health

*

For those who are alone or in groups

A family of men, women, and children

With rumbling and distended abdomens

Craving food and drink

A desire to be seen as a human being

While the rest of us upstanding and educated citizens

look at them in disgust

and the word LAZY leaves our lips

*

When will we realize that children can’t learn Math and English

when the only subject they know is deprivation of their needs

How can you concentrate when the insides of your stomach are speaking loudly, and you can’t make the noise cease?

*

To those who are lost and misjudged

A square piece rounded to fit into a circular plug

To those stripped of their beautiful pigment

Using decolorization to revert them to default settings

Their way of silencing their uniqueness

How dare they try to be different

*

To those who feel defeated

Tired from years of cage fighting with their minds

Hiding internal bruises, broken bones and pain

Dressed up in fancy clothes, a good skin regimen and good teeth

Enhanced with a vocabulary of perfect words and a smile

so convincing because mental health doesn’t exist

*

For those who are trying

For those who are struggling

For those who want to be seen

I see you

*

It is not what part of the world we come from

It is not our socioeconomic status or our privileged positions

Not the color of our skin

Not our gender or our religious beliefs

What makes me and you human beings

are our developed brains

our capacity to speak

our ability to reason

If not for those things, we would be animals

Maybe then we would learn to show more compassion

Why can’t we see and treat each other as humans?

.............................................

Thank you for reading! Your time is appreciated.

This poem was first published on Medium.