Wheat - A Poem

 

 

At lunch in my friend's big white ivy walled house
my friend's dad says, the wheat in their land is white,
I tell him, ours is red
he says theirs is the better kind.

I go back to my smaller home in the broken down bus and ask my dad
if it's true that red grains are worse than white
and white bread is better than our brown-red?

my dad says he doesn't know.
roti is roti.
wheat is wheat.

I go to bed and cry that night
Why is my wheat not white?

My grandmother always said my younger brother is the handsomest.
He's red-brown, just like the wheat we grow in our village.
And in my impressionable mind where
the world ends where my friend's seventy year old father's opinion starts,
I forget about the horizons and the stars.
Because my roti and my skin might as well be just as dark;
I don't agree with my grandmother.

She calls this color "gandami" - wheat like.
And is proud of the grains we grow with our own hands.
And I
I feel shame that I come from a family of people who still live in mud houses
Who grow peanuts and walk ten miles in the sand
barefoot
to grow the red wheat they don't know the world doesn't love.
They don't know
Of fair-and lovely miracles and brick walled buildings inhabited by pretty people
who eat white bread, and don't need to scrub their face with a beauty soap like I do.

My father is the kind of handsome that my mum hates
Because other women stare.
My father likes to sleep and stay
But he's not as white as my friend's father who's roamed around the world
with his beautiful whiter face.

I don't like my purple lips.
I don't like my black hair and these black eyes.
And somewhat black face.
I want white.
I want everything to be white.

I tell my dad how I feel.
And he tells me it's not my skin
and it's not the wheat.
or the calloused barefoot past of my family

It's me.
And says.

As long as you don't look at other people's food
with your own you’ll be happy.