minimalism

 She lived with her landless family on a farm in a neighboring village. 

Her weathered papi was a campesino, with wrinkles on his face for all of the times he had walked down long rows of beans in the hot sun to hoe away weeds. 

There was a kindness in his eyes that welled up from the deep feelings he felt as he worked to keep his family alive. 

His hands and feet were calloused and gnarled, for they had been blistered and broken and used as tools all of his life. 

He worked from the time he toddled beside his own papi until now, in the time of his middle age, when the same land, the land of the wealthy land owners, bent his back to make him continually genuflect to God, or to the land, or to the land owner himself. 

He was not a political person. 

She observed his life, however, for she was a gifted girl who saw deeply into the lives of people and knew simply, simply knew, the inner workings of the human heart. 

In that observation, she saw the life of her papi speak eloquently, “I am a human being…no person is more important than another…my family has a right to food, shelter, clothing, school, and medicine…We are human beings,” and those words grew with her and were watered by the laughter she laughed as she was playing with friends and the tears she cried as she was laying in bed hungry from only one meal for the day.

- trevor scott barton, poems for a brown-eyed girl, 2020