Every Person Is Born Equal

Every Person Is Born Equal
© Surazeus
2019 02 02

While riding crowded bus through city streets,
jostled by tires bouncing on asphalt lumps,
I imagine being chained on a slave ship
three hundred years ago from Africa
taken by force and hurled across the sea
then sold to pick cotton in sweltering fields.

No human should suffer indignity
of being enslaved to labor endless days
against our will, beaten if we resist,
for excess profit of another person,
then thrown nameless in the dark silent grave
when death consumes our waning energy.

The color of our skin, dark brown to white,
should be irrelevant to basic rights
of liberty to pursue happiness
working our projects of creative will
and building private life with family
equal in judgment of impartial law.

Though none of my ancestors were enslaved,
and some may have owned good people as slaves
before the Civil War broken iron chains,
I see this world through eyes of every human
and wish for every person in this world
to enjoy freedom of creative love.

Stepping off the bus to walk downtown streets
and glide slowly with admiring respect
for every nameless stranger passing by,
I gaze amazed at rich variety
of human faces in colors and shapes
now here from every nation in the world.

How different we are now from those lost days
just over one hundred some years ago
when social structures let one group of people
enslave another group to exploit labor,
yet all are equal now under one law,
though most are still not treated as they should.

Though we restructured social institutions
providing basic liberty and rights
for every person alive in this world
still too many people with darker skin
are not treated with dignity of love
they deserve by virtue of being alive.

Now we are shaking loose through social storms
last racist deeds from rafters of our nation
so we can reassert good principle
that every person born into this world
lives equal within justice of our courts
and behave as we will if we harm none.