Them and Us

Walking among them,
Staring,
Not understanding,
Why.

Watching the others,
With no accents,
No scars,
Seeing them laughing,
They don’t understand.

I see them in nightmares,
Always smiling,
On the surface,
But it doesn’t reach their eyes.

We smile.
We laugh.
We work.
Who are we?

Their eyes tell their stories.
But their laughter tells another,
We never stop to think,
who they are.

In our country,
we’re at home,
we’re at peace,
Not.
That’s why we came.

We look at their faces,
Sometimes every day,
And yet,
we don’t see.

We came here,
for a reason.
To send money home,
or just to get away.

We don’t see who they are,
below the surface,
are they fathers?
are they husbands?
They don’t see like we do.
They look at us,
and see
accents and poor English,
black hair and dark skin.
What they don’t see,
is our lives.

We don’t stop to think,
Maybe they don’t want to,
Maybe they have a past,
Maybe they’re real people.
No.
To us, they’re workers.
They’re foreign.

We’re migrant workers.
They’re our employers.
There’s a difference.

We’re their employers.
They’re migrant workers we hire.
There’s a difference.

What if the only difference
is where we come from,
what language we speak,
and how we look?
What if we could learn to accept them
on both sides?
Will that ever happen?