White walls and Green people
That afternoon, in a park, a little girl came up to me. She had wide, clear eyes and a smile I still can’t account for. Long blue pens lay across her lap, and she held them out to passersby like pieces of hope the world had forgotten to buy.
They called her a beggar.
It’s a strange word to throw at a child, as if the rest of us had never held out a hand.
Beggar’s Portrait
I came from a place
where warmth cost nothing,
where food arrived without asking,
where the dark held me
more gently than the world has since.
Then one day I was pushed out of my mother
and begged for my first breath.
That was my first transaction,
and my first debt.
I begged for milk, for her arms,
for someone to hush me
whenever being alive got uncomfortable.
I had barely arrived
and I was already asking for more.
I begged for words
before I knew what a word was.
Then for marks, for praise,
for a friend who’d save me a seat,
for laughter that wasn’t about me.
I begged to become somebody.
When I got there, I begged to be somebody else.
Ahh, Childhood a small market
where we trade innocence for approval
and call the trade growing up.
I wasn’t always begging for myself.
I begged for my parents’ happiness,
for a friend to get well,
for strangers I’ll never meet,
for a country I still carry.
I begged in front of statues
we agreed to call gods,
under stars that never replied,
and in front of the mirror.
That small, cruel deity
who knew my face
and never granted one wish.
I asked for love from people who had none to give.
I asked for certainty from a universe
that can’t explain why it exists.
And I called all this ambition.
A beggar with a dream is a visionary.
A beggar without one is a nuisance.
We polish our shoes, put on a tie,
and learn to beg behind closed doors.
Some call it networking.
Some call it prayer.
The lucky call it opportunity,
and the unlucky get asked
why they can’t stand on their own feet.
So I kept going.
I begged for peace
in a world that made a business of war,
for money in an economy
that charges interest on staying alive,
for time,
while every clock I owned
was busy taking it from me.
Now I beg for life itself,
like death is a landlord
and I’m asking for one more month.
So what makes a beggar?
The hand that asks?
The hunger behind it?
Or the eyes of the people
who'd rather not look?
Maybe the girl understood
what I never did.
She sat there with her blue pens
and her astonishing smile
and let her need show.
I had spent years selling pieces of myself
for things I couldn’t keep.
When they called her a beggar
and not me,
something small and childish stirred in my chest.
I was jealous.
I envied her the nerve
to be what I was.
She knew what she needed.
I had become so polished
I couldn’t tell what to ask for first.
I’m not giving up, though.
I still want things.
Let me beg for the living,
the dying, the forgotten,
and for those who’ve forgotten
they’re allowed to ask for better.
And when my voice cracks,
when my knees give out,
when even the heavens are tired
of my petitions,
let it be written
that I didn’t beg only to survive.
I begged because I wanted
the world to be kinder than it was.
And if this kingdom of open hands
needs a king, crown me.
Make me the poorest king
in the richest kingdom of wanting.
Out there, far from the shore,
salt on my lips
and the whole horizon in front of me,
I’ll stretch my hands toward the blue.
I don’t expect the sea to answer.
After all these years
it still can’t make a beggar
stop wanting more.
Begging far away, before the sea.