Shadows and Darknesses

Growing up,

I quickly learned to ignore the shadows of my cities

Shadows that:

lived under the overpasses

ran by the railways

begged in the traffics.

I was taught to lever look the shadows in their eyes.

“They prey on innocence,” I was told.

“As soon as you look into the shadows

they will creep into your lights.”

So I looked away, into the lights of my cities

while my trains sped past their slums

my buses sped past their shanties

And my life sped past our cities of shadows.

 

And then when I came to live in the cities of lights

Where the shadows are kept at bay

With massive floodlights at the borders

I came to realize that

The shadows that I despised

Growing up,

were never shadows at all.

They were darknesses

of my blind spots and guilts,

projected outwards.

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