Skip to main content

Please Don’t Tell Me (from the poetry book "In and Out of Season"



Please don’t tell me
You don’t see color
 Don’t worry
I ain’t mad at you
I’m just confused
Why don’t you?
Would you look at a sunset and say
“Oh I don’t see its radiance”
Or feel the breeze of a Colorado summer morning and say
“Oh I don’t feel that cool breeze on my face”?
Now I’m not delusional
I know I’m not a sunset or a morning breeze
But I am a man
A black man
And I see you, brother
So please don’t tell me
You don’t see me

Ignoring our diversity
Is not bringing us closer together
It’s creating an invisible wall of silence
Acceptance because I assimilated is not acceptance
And pretending that I “fit in” when I don’t creates suspicion and ignorance
Fear and tension
The Enemy uses these weapons to create the borderlines between us
So talk to me
I want to talk to you
Listen to me
I want to listen to you
We don’t have to agree on everything
Believe it or not
I don’t agree with every black person I know either
But the love is there
And isn’t love greater than colorblindness?
So please, don’t tell me
You don’t see my color
When God intentionally made it obvious



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Watching My Step

I've always had big feet. It's true. There was never a moment in my childhood when my feet were not an object of frustration and ridicule. And those "dogs" were all over the place, facing the wrong direction, tripping over themselves, tripping over coffee tables, desks, chairs, other people. It was embarrasing. Watching my step was a full time job. Since becoming a man, I've mastered my former oppressors (my size 14's) and you would hardly noticed my attention to detail. However, today, at 40, I'm still watching my step. With so much experience and success with walking and watching my step, I've discovered that the same is true in my spiritual life as well. I haven't always watched my step in life and of course, it resulted in me finding myself in all kinds of traps, snares and dead ends. I've spent years tripping over my sinful habits and walking down dirt roads that lead to nowhere. To no one's blame but my own. After experiencin...
1 comment
Read more

The Force of Divorce (Part 3)

If we as adults experience this horrific effect of the force of divorce, how much more do our children ache and groan from an unreachable wound? A wound that will fester and spread an infection, if at some point they never get healing. Even though I was blessed with my period of beforeness, the force of divorce crashed down on my little life, sending the foundation of everything I held as stable and true into a violent whirlwind. And I was one of the “lucky” ones, by the our society’s perspective. I was never physically abused by my father; never had to sleep under the bed at night for fear of what the night would bring. I was swept away in the middle of the night by my mother and a priest who rushed us to the airport. Somehow my dad caught up with us and I remember he had one of my arms and my mom had the other both of them pulling me in opposite directions. How about that for a visual of a broken family? My mother won the tug of war and I boarded an airplane...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day 19: Write in Someone Else’s Voice

The Coward The boy’s voice awakened the man.   He found shelter in the abandoned school, in what was once, his school, his office.   Eleven, twelve, and thirteen year old students once ran down those halls, hurrying to their classes, hurrying to his English class. Now since the incident, no children survived that massacre.   That thought made the man shake with fear until he drifted off to sleep.   So when the man heard the boy’s voice screaming “Help Me!, Please Help Me!”   it shook the man from his sleep.   The man laid still.   His heart pounded as he waited to hear boy again.   “Help me! Please Somebody!” The man heard the boy loud and clear.   He could not pretend it was some animal or dream.   He knew it was a boy. And it paralyzed him.   The man clutched his knees to his chest and tucked his chin.   He took slow deep breaths, silent breaths, hoping the boy would believe he was on his own, ...
Post a Comment
Read more