literature

Spanish Eyes

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Literature Text

Crowded streets,
Overflowing with life,
And renewed energy.
The surplus of sights and sounds,
Is raining down around you;
And while they discover the scent of hope in the air,
You feel the minority
Suffocating your freedom.

As you pass,
Spanish eyes flicker up to meet you,
A stranger’s gaze, meeting yours for a
fleeting
instant in time.
So inconsequential.

So why is it –?
You feel your breath hitch at the sight of her?

The answer is simple.
This mother is…
Meaningfully meaningless.    .     .     .    .
Two travelers,
Wandering down
Separate paths, to separate ends.

Won’t you take the time to turn your head and see where she goes?

See how
The road looks smooth.
The earth seems gentle beneath bare feet –

Get CLOSER.
Look with the glorious blindness
That every child has - -

The others have already made up their mind about her.
She does not have an identity.
She does not have a name.
She is nothing to this country but another one of 'them'
God Bless Statistics.

Go ahead,
Your fair complexion
And golden hair
Have instilled within you
The divine right to judge this woman.

- - suddenly - -
Your toes are burning from the fiery sand,
While cracked and bleeding lips
Beg you for the taste of agua pura*.
  The kind that can only be found within the eagle’s nest  

Nuestras vidas serán mejores aquí *.

No! Close your eyes! Don’t look too hard!
It is better to…

Step BACK
and
Adopt the blindness of adults.

Call her lazy,
Dirty,
Wretched.
  Place all of your problems and misfortunes on this alien soul.
          /she is to blame/
  Turn a deaf ear to the sweet sounds of a Spanish limerick.
          /just ignorant children/   
  It is easier than facing this burning truth,
         /this cruel reality…/
  This flaming accuracy of Gabriel’s unforgiving sword.


So look upon her raven hair, and
Sun kissed skin, and
Tell me again
(From your place of superiority),
How she is only worthy of cooking your meals and
cleaning
    your
        floors.

Leave her to pick up the mess you have left behind.
The shards of glass from a broken melting pot.

Wash your hands before the multitude,
And do nothing to stop this injustice.

Do as the vultures-
                             -as the eagles do.
Turn up your nose,
Look down at her…
                        …another of the colored insects…
                          …that lies squirming beneath your freshly shined shoe.

Woe to you!
Forced to subsist in such a filthy world.




What’s this?




You have lost yourself within the American crowd.
The preview image was NOT created by me. It is a copyrighted work that can be found in the Virginia Tech Research Magazine. For more information, click here.

I had a hard time deciding whether this should go under the Sociopolitical category, Satire, or Human Nature...

(Big ass description below:)
_______ __~*~__ ___ ________
Again, when I began this poem, it started off as something drastically different than what I ended up with.

My mind, for some reason, began to linger on that feeling that one gets when you are swept up in a large crowd. Although that feeling of energy and excitement is something that I personally adore - it is also a feeling that is frightening in many ways. Strange how easily our identities can be lost. To think that so few people actually know the person we truly are. Sometimes it makes you wonder if you're just another body in the crowd...

Needless to say, all these thoughts made me want to write something over identity - asking the question 'can you see who someone is - know their stories, their hardships, their being - just by a single fleeting glance or encounter in time?'. I was going to ramble over the different thoughts or emotions that might be bustling inside that man who bumped into you on the sidewalk, or the woman sitting at the table across from you at the coffee shop - but

...the entire topic for my poem changed when I got to the second line in which I wanted to describe a stranger's eyes. Brown? no. Chocolate? no... Spanish. Spanish eyes.

Funny how easy it is to label everyone...Spanish, African, Asian...

So thus, my end result was a critique on immigration >_<;;
© 2006 - 2024 Ookami072
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Elsola's avatar
I cried reading this. Beautiful.