breathe in experience breathe out poetry - Muriel Rukeyser

We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.

The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water,
the camps and their groves were colored with the dust,
we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust.
Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves,
it stayed and the rain couldn't wash it away and it twinkled
that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles.

As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night,
with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white.
The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.

Their faces said : This is your home; and I .
I never come home, I never go away.
And they all answered : Stay.