Mirror
meditation, lamentation, 03.15.19
I don’t know how to say it, other than plain:
Fear of things you don’t understand
and people you don’t know
is not wisdom.
There has never been a time
when you could buy your freedom
with someone else’s sorrow or blood.
Violence — in thought, word, deed — cannot protect you,
and the reason you never feel safe enough
is because the thing that hunts you
lives right under your own skin: there,
in the flicker behind your eyes,
like a scrolling headline you believe
without stopping to wonder if it is true,
a shadow that says to you:
You’ll only feel free when every last one of them is gone,
silenced, converted, deported, buried.
But look: there they are:
handcuffed, strangled,
jailed, intimidated, caged,
refused, shut out, maligned, face down
on shorelines and bomb-ripped streets
and asphalt, with prayers on their lips,
and, unaccountably,
you wake up afraid, still so afraid.
And now, when you go to
brush your teeth, watch your news,
open your laptop, teach your kids,
drive to Sunday church, you find
the predictions of doom all coming true, because
you carried in you, as we all do, a dark coiled animal,
and you fed it through the bars in secret,
and you left the door unlatched, and now
you are the one who unleashes the destruction
you warned about.
