Newlike Eyes

This morning, by the golden rays peering like a searchlight through my window,

I woke up blue, eyes swelled by a year of isolation from what lies beyond that door.

Like Plato's prisoner, I wonder do the shadows on my wall reflect the real.

Can it be that the bright reveals what darkness lies

in the hearts of the men and women outside?

My son, the light of my life asked me

if the men in blue were going to kill that black man.

The very question leaves me bruised.

How do you answer a child in his primary stage, who knows nothing of chromatic systems?

The world is teaching him to sort in a way that I would not.

He does not know how his innocent questions sound to a jaded audience.

He's scared of blood, from the veins of red he's seen running down the faces of the people on the RGB.

His fear is not only that it will happen to him,

but that he can no longer trust the very people he is supposed to trust,

too early to learn these lessons.

Was it the man with the yellow hair or the threat of a purple coded world?

Was it the gray smoke obscuring Britney's pink building,

the orange flares hurled by the black and whites

or just the privileged pixels overseeing it all?

If noises were colors, would his ears bleed the rainbow?

Images, whatever their shade, are hard to forget, cross-hatched onto your brain.

Only a minute ago, these colors to his newly minted mind

signaled signs of the beauty and joy that lay ahead,

now tarnished a copper green like the tears of the lady

who once promised so much of the red white and blue.

As the waters muddy what seemed so bright,

her lovely vision this great land,

my child's words paint new hues

as without words his hope renews.

Unburdoned by history or memory or pain,

our dissappointment of having let down our peers

by moving the world one step further from fear,

his generation is learning to love one another,

he loves all the colors, his sisters and brothers.

would that my trampled heart could be like his,

shed the redness of embarrassment

I wear on my white skin.

I am not too old to learn from him.

We cannot, of course, ever forget

We cannot unbind color from regret;

Perhaps through young eyes, though, whose world is new

we can see the whole spectrum and let it be true

that we respect each other

...every pigment and hue.