Appearances Poem by Edwina Reizer

What's in the color of your skin?
Just the body that you're in.
A body that has all the same organs
of everybody that's ever been.

Isn't it amazing how we've been taught
to believe that we're different.
Sure we're different in our appearances
right down to our thumbprint.

But again that thumbprint is just skin,
not the character and not the hope.
And there's the beauty in the differences
like the colors of a kaleidoscope.

We are all striving for fairness and joy
whether we were born a girl or a boy.
The ignorance that surrounds all the bigots
is a lack of intelligence they employ

in viewing color,
in demeaning color,
in blaming color,
in labeling color,
in dehumanizing color.

For all of their own inadequacies and guilt
in not allowing themselves to see the sameness
in how we all are built.