On my first day at school I learn to
say ‘yes’ to everything, to accept the dogs’ fight
for the best seat at the open-screen cinema.
I learn the silence of a dry pen,
lost in a great pile of bones.
I learn to agree with the history,
for it has the right to choose terror
over Vermeer’s ‘Girl in Hyacinth Blue’.
All my books have a few missing chapters but
my teacher says that acceptance, not hope,
is the best weapon against dreams.
I learn that I was not born a slave but
I became one.
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