ALL LIVES MATTER

I’m a white man trying to know

what it looks and feels like to go out

into the world as a person of color.

The obvious stacking of the deck

is now and always has been obvious.

I was a little boy in Arkansas 

in a little town which had a good school

for white kids like me,

Black kids went to school in a house

on the other side of the tracks,

not a house built for schooling kids

but a small modest house built for living.

My mother took me there once

to see and hear the kids singing.

What I saw was very different 

from anything I experienced in my school.

Desks were old and rooms were crowded.

Mother and I were greeted and treated

like people stopping in from another realm,

which was exactly what we were… aliens.

I was seven or eight or nine years old.

I didn’t know enough then to understand

why the school was different from mine,

but I wondered even when I wasn’t yet ten

what kind of world it is that makes a difference

between white kids and kids of another color.

I wondered why in the scheme of things

I had been born with a lighter skin color.  

I saw that my Mother could see the difference

between our skin and the skin of all those others.

I don’t remember how the rest of that day went.

My life continued at home with white everything.

I didn’t know scientific reasons for anything, 

but I knew there was something terribly wrong

in the world that sets up white people like me

to have circumstances of living so different

from those I saw that day seventy plus years ago.