Pigeons

The longest and most deep poem I've written. My sole aim of this poem was to raise awareness of bullying.

When I was six,
I learnt the biggest business,
was the business of ‘mind your own’
If I had known a ruder tone,
to express my disgust,
to a six year old boy, whose business went bust
because he invited another
I’d say, son, listen to your mother,
Heed her advice like the price tag on that toy
you just can’t afford,
Hear it like a chord, with a cadence
so perfect, the audience applaud
Sounds of an echo that never will fade
like memories made by being a kid,
when all that we did
was play hopscotch, through ten squares
like cares were something we didn’t know how to give.
The greatest gift we had, was our voices, and though
we used them for wrong, every chorus, every song,
had a moral, a lesson to teach about speech and
a word to the young whose hateful words, flowed
from a hateful tongue that we called ‘Bully.’
Even now his name is left out, it was lonelier at the top
but we climbed the ladder because every word they hung,
from every splintered rung, was just a hurdle,
on the sprint to success.
It wasn’t easy, but we ran. We ran like antelope
whose past kept chasing but whose future
was pastures greener and cleaner where
deer sipped from waters clear and fear,
was left behind.
It was not just a mirage,
an image formed from the ideals we had
and call me mad,
but,
I always believed this was coming.
This brighter, better place, where the face of another
is not as beautiful as the soul, and our goal is to love
and respect,
rather than paint a world black with the perfection we lack
because we are not perfect.
But who said human flaws should be written like laws,
as if the bruises we bear made us criminals there, in the battleground
we called school.
It was never cool, to fire your words at a sky full of birds
in the hopes one might fall.
Sure you may hit a dove and destroy all it’s beauty but you fired more
and more as they drop to the floor, one by one.
Leaving just one ugly pigeon who is now the most elegant bird in the sky.
Without beauty to compare, we are equally as fair, in flight and in grace, as the pigeon whose face we dared call ugly.