I wonder to which point
When someone says they are sorry,
Only after being called out by one of their pairs
Are they truly sorry
Or is it group think?
The hope of not being ostracized
Not being left out of the zeitgeist of the times
Still belonging to their group
Not being left out

Who knows what will they become if that happens
There are so many shades of brown.

***
It’s so hard to learn to be brown
It takes a lifetime
Not to hate ourselves

And how to teach our kids to learn to love their browness
Their blackness
Their otherness
When we can barely love ourselves
Define ourselves outside our browness
Transcend the skin, move to personhood
To human hood
To be, beyond what we think we are
No
To be beyond what others tell us we are

The tears do not clean.
They remove the make up I applied onto my skin.

***
Hi YNF
Yep
It sucks
I don’t know what to tell you. It feels at times I spent my lifetime trying to be in the good graces of White peoples. To be accepted. To be desired. To be wanted. Not to be needed when it was convenient to have a black/brown friend on the messaging app to say “I have friends of all colors and shades.” But like you said in your other piece. Friendship.

You are right, there is always a feeling of otherness as a brown/black person in Latin America. I don’t know. Whatever.

I don’t know if those middle verses qualify as a a poem. Do you want to add me to your publication and I try to expand it?

Anyway. Thank you for writing.
P