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Poetry News Post #4728

Foreigner

Written by: Tumbler Tillie, Blade Dancer
Date: Saturday, July 26th, 2014
Addressed to: Everyone


Tiny hands that never noticed their slightly different shape and width-
clasped together, both seemed so small,
both riddled with calluses,
both infested with blisters.
Twenty fingernails in all, coated and caked with dirt.

Fiery flames of matted red hair - it all looked the same, then:
Just like ruddy cheeks and freckles,
dimpled smiles and winded faces,
blood rising from running, chasing goats through farmer's lands,
tiny hands clasping tiny hands.

The mountains and valleys - our toy and toil - treated us as equals -
Gifting us with scabs and scrapes,
identically, we bled,
and scars left behind, they left white lines tracing the skin over our veins.

Now I am "foreigner."

Gem-bright eyes dart the other way whenever I clamber through their hills.
Their mountains.
Their shops.
Their Temple.
Hands now slightly larger - hands that still echo my own - now grip the shoulders of their children,
and jerk them the other way.

Foreigner.

The sound of their tongue feeling numb and desperate from my throat
forgotten, useless
different, now that I am grown.

I am slightly taller
I am Human
I am so distinctively, outwardly "not"
And that is what makes me foreign.

My heart still beats like a hammer
my blood still runs the same deep, ruby red -
and my scars paint a past riddled from work
we once called "play"

We once were friends
We once were young

And now I understand that youth may know no difference -
But Time pays that price
and fills me with regret and shame -
and "same" is no longer that blissful "same."


Penned by my hand on the 18th of Valnuary, in the year 660 AF.


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