Encounter

 

Once I met a human being.

It was a man or a woman, as I recall.

It was black or white or possibly Chinese,

Or Indian or the other kind of Indian,

And it had an age and a color of hair.

But mostly, it was just a human being,

As full of doubt and courage as myself,

And when it spoke it was not age or gender,

Nor hair-color, faith, or citizenship that spoke;

It was, instead, the human being speaking,

In the words it could find at that particular moment,

And I listened with all the attention and empathy

That I could muster up at that particular time.

We parted, then, and I went back to my

Momentary and eternal concerns,

And so did he or she, and we mostly forgot,

But never forgot completely, the words that we had said

As one human being talking with another –

Wearing our skins, but speaking from inside.