How Can You Hate Me Poem by James Waters

How can you hate me for the color of my skin?
Because I am short or tall or fat or thin
How can you hate me because of my race?
Do we not all have a human face?

How can you hate me because of the way that I speak?
Why do you call me names like dork or geek?
How can you hate me because I am not rich?
Because your father owns a corporation and mine digs a ditch?

How can you hate me for whom I choose to love?
My life was given to me, from the master above
How can you hate me for my political choice?
Is it not my right to give my opinion a voice?

How can you hate me for hating the evil I see?
I simply want our country to be all it can be
The home of the honest, the brave, and the true
Is that so different from the desires held by you?

Are we not brothers you and I?
Do we not both feel anger and cry?
Do we not both have families we love?
Do we not both pray to our God up above?

Where is the difference between you and I?
Is not the hate in fact a lie?
Are you following your heart or does society speak for you?
Or are you listening to a bigot’s point of view

Love or hate by your own design
Let you own heart draw the line
Never pre-judge that which you do not know
For friends or enemies are the seeds we sow