We built gilded walls where windows used to be,
bricked up the doors that once swung wide
and opened to the light,
and turned difference into danger,
otherness into enemy,
the stranger into stranger and feared the unfamiliar face,
said the colour is not right,
the accent not like ours,
the food smells of another place,
as if it were a threat and not a gift,
as if the world were small and we wished it so,
as if diversity diluted us and who we thought we were,
as if we lost who we are in the troubled puzzle of living,
and so we huddle smiling in our sameness,
trying to find this one identity as elusive as the self,
call it safety, call it heritage,
nostalgia, a returning to the ‘good old days’,
call it anything but what it is:
a slow forgetting that we too were once the other,
that our grandparents spoke in tongues we’ve now erased,
that every border drawn is just a scar still bleeding,
where connection failed,
where curiosity died,
where fear won out over the wild,
replaced by the illusion that there is nothing to know,
and the possibility, the risk, of meeting someone and discovering
universes wider, richer, than our own
is murdered, cold-blooded by our own
careful, frightened thoughts, and by the betrayal
of being caught up in histories prized and iconified,
and the desert of never wishing to change.

 

8/11/2025