We Had Lived And Died And Survived Poem by RIC BASTASA

The best people in this world
are those who underestimate us
these people, bring the best in us

they say we are tiny people
and we tell them that we really are

and we say we like attacking and questioning
and even harming the big people out there
and that most of us are either dead or
or badly injured, dying and salvaged and
kept in detentions and solitary places of
their wicked hearts

they keep on humiliating us and we keep on
blooming as though the insults are water and
fertilizers to our beings
we become seeds growing underneath their
cruelties
for long but they won't last like everyone else
like us

and that is fair enough i suppose

when we come out from here perhaps
we see each other again
not as priests, or doctors or lawyers or
politicians but as naked souls

heading for our own reserved places
whatever that be

we who had been subjected to the hell of this earth
are not surprised
if there is hell or heaven
we do not care
we had the former anyway
and we had
lived and died and survived.