Eyes
Eyes
like rich, brown earth
embracing the roots of trees,
of grass and weeds,
supporting the burrows of honey badgers,
the trenches of earthworms,
understanding their needs
and helping them grow,
and bloom,
and flourish,
maintaining the fragile balance
between animal and plant,
predator and prey
nature and man.
Eyes
like cold, blue ice,
towers drifting on a calm sea
leaving destructive waves in their wake,
looming imperiously over the world,
its wild forests,
its untamed peoples,
haughtily claiming it as its own
before laying it all to waste
in neat little rows
of metal
and smog
and industry.
Eyes
survey each other,
Earth and Ice
meeting for the first time
in seventy thousand years,
their journey together from the womb of humanity
all but forgotten.
Ice sweeps across wary Earth,
razing its forests,
slaying its peoples,
sweeping the world into an Ice Age
fueled by the frozen fires
of Progress.
Author’s Note:
This was written by a high schooler who had only just started learning of the scars colonialism and imperialism had left upon humanity. Those scars manifest in many ways— in our division of the world into First World and Third World countries, in the unspoken genocide of countless African civilizations, in the refugee crisis, in racism and xenophobia and structural inequality— and also in the history and human geography taught to us in schools. I was lucky enough to go to a highly ranked public high school, and the history and human geography I learned were still severely whitewashed and Euro-centric. World History was only “world history” when we were learning about ancient civilizations. After that, everything was Euro-centric, and the growth and change that happened in India or China or anywhere in Africa, as well as the contact and mixing of peoples and cultures and goods and knowledge between all these civilizations, were largely ignored, or only briefly mentioned to explain what was going on in Europe.
I have since taken college courses and have done online searching that have opened my eyes to just how rich history everywhere is, and just how much mixing of knowledge and goods and services and culture and people had happened, and has always happened. India was a central hub for trade— it traded with China, and with the Roman Empire, and even before that with Mesopotamia. When the Western Roman Empire fell, the Byzantine Empire survived, and traded with India and China for centuries. As the Byzantine Empire shrunk and fell, those trade routes remained ingrained in the roads and maps and seas and wind patterns, and were used by the Sultanate to spread influence to India. Why didn’t we see anything about the Roman Empire’s trade with India, when it was Indian astronomers and mathematicians who taught the Romans much of what they knew about tracking the stars?
All of this is to say that some aspects of the poem above are wrong. Europe had contact with India and China and the many different cultures and civilizations of Africa long after humans had migrated across the world. The Vikings knew of the Americas long before Christopher Columbus had “discovered” and misnamed the West Indies, thinking the islands he had encountered to be just west of India. Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes have had a long history of contact and trade and mixing of ideas and cultures.
But the point still stands. Europe, in the name of opening trade routes and increasing wealth, came upon the peoples of the Americas, and saw that they were different, and decided that “different” meant “inferior”. Europe met cultures and civilizations who had clean water and clean streets and architectural marvels that still remain today, and Europe brought them disease and gunfire and death. Europe looked upon the world and all its peoples, and said, “This land is my land.”
And even now, the whole world suffers for it.