Inequality Poem

When you are exiled by circumstance, only the exile
is legible to others: your body, your illness, your employment

status, your poverty, your citizenship or lack thereof.
It is silently assumed of you that your exile must

have some reasonable cause, just as it is silently assumed
of the world that it is a fair and reasonable place

by those who have no experience of the alternative.
Let me put it another way: you are up in a tree,

leaves and the strength of your own limbs all around you
and the view is of rolling hills and insignificant

other people out enjoying a summer’s day.
Their brightly colored clothes, their picnic blankets.

But what if you are up in a tree and down below you
is nothing but rushing water, and it is rising,

and the view is empty of people, others already
washed away, those who could not climb up

the tree, or were not near a tree, or who went back
to help a child, or whose tree branch broke beneath them?

This can no longer be, of course, a metaphor, and yet
it also still functions as metaphor. Isn’t that something?

When you are exiled by circumstance, you become one
who knows that the world is a field of rising water,

that safety is the purview of the lucky, the able, the ruthless,
the unattached and the well-supported. You know the truth:

you are in the water scrambling for some solid ground,
or you are in the tree, or else you are already gone.

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