Food4thought: Wearing Red

Wearing Red

It’s red like bright cherries, sweet and full

It’s red like cotton helping your vein coagulate

It’s red like a young girl, twirling her autumn dress

It’s red like plumerias, delicate yet fragrant

Food4Thought: Perspective

Perspective

A closed blade hides behind

Information and keys,

Like power hiding behind

Wise men and guards,

Or knights awaiting orders

From the intellects and affluentials.

Perhaps the items reflect an assassin

Targeting the informed and the informer.

But what if we’re looking at it wrong?

What if the order is different

And the keys are behind

The knife and the knowledge,

Implying that if we want to open doors

We must first have power and intelligence,

Or if treasure is to be unlocked

Geniuses and brutes must together lead.

Yet we can

Rotate this again

So that knowledge is guarded

By the keys and the knife,

Implying that secrets are only found

At the cost of bloodshed,

Or the truth resides

In both the lowly guards and the noble knights.

See how a slight shift

Alters one’s perspective?

It’s like someone told me long ago,

“Just because it makes sense,

Doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Food4thought: Appeasement's Twin

Appeasement’s Twin

Do you even know who I am?

Or has my twin stolen my name again?

It’s so frustrating to be invisible

To never be truly known

Because someone told you he was me

And for pity’s sake we hardly look alike

My so-called friends won’t clear my name

Instead they tell me, “Stay quiet.”

Or, “Be more like your brother!”

Are girls not allowed to speak?

Look how he walks to the podium

Smiling like some two-faced politician

Giving his sermon against war

In many ways, I agree

I suppose that’s why we’re twins

But what about the oppressed?

How are their lives tranquil?

Striving for food day after day

Drenched in poverty producing pain

Even my cousin, Hope, is withheld from them

Her beaming face and healing words

Removed from their lives of despair

All to what avail?

To keep you in your pseudocomforts?

Don’t you see this truth?

That unless you stand up for them

Unless they are made free

Free of their suffering and shame

You will never have me:

Peace.