Race

Are we talking about
Skin color? Ethnicity?
Culture?
Strands of DNA,
Blood percentages,
Country of origin,
Language spoken,
Explaining a name or a look,
The content of one’s beliefs,
How your family acts,
Or who they are?

Are you asking or assuming
For my benefit or yours?
Mere curiosity?
What story does that information tell
You about Me?

Shouldn’t it be about
Asking our ancestors
For their life lessons
And good blessings,
Celebrating them creating us,
Acknowledge they survived what was faced,
Then wanting to share that wisdom
With other people we love?
Isn’t that the true meaning?

Reaching through our collective years
Of moving through space and time,
Sifting through information
Inventing further,
All of our ancestors
Burnishing that Life
As beautiful as can be.
Carrying all of their hopes,
Mistakes and fortunes,
Good and bad.
Honoring what we’ve each
Brought to our collective futures.

And how far do we count family?
Surely somewhere in my past
I was evolved from microscopic lifeform
Living in cosmic primordial ooze
Hit by lightening to
Grow legs and think,
Build with thumbs
And make fire
Form ideas amongst each other
And converse as community.
What do I call those ancestors?
I don’t have to speak their language
To know they are here with me
Having brought me to today.
Maybe you were there too
In some way back then,
And does that change
the question or my answer,
When you want to know my name?

Anything becoming from me
Or my elements…
Aren’t they
Then my offspring,
My children?
Even ideas shared,
Then carried by another,
Evolving…they are all my children
By some kind of birth,
Just as I carry grown offspring
Of others,
Tending the children of parent’s thoughts.

All that reality,
The is, and ever was, and will be,
All my relations
Want to know
What the question is
You think you are asking so simply?