Are we not the same, you and I?
I bid you taste the tears that fall
from both our eyes and tell me we are not
one people whose hearts drink
from the cup of a common sorrow.

I tell you we are both the same,
no matter the million ways the world
would conquer and divide us,
pit the one against
the other.

I ask you this: do our hands, when cut, 
not bleed the same color, a river of red?
Do we not both love our families
with intense devotion?

I am certain: we both comprehend
the certainty of death and also 
the fleeting beauty
of this life.

We are the same, you and I.
I thirst, as do you, for Spirit and reach
for something more, stretching frail
and fragile fingers further, far enough
to find faith –

A blessing,
A curse.

Are we not the same, you and I?
Have our feet not traveled down one
too many dusty roads that have led us
not to the end we had expected
but to endless new beginnings?

Hear my grief. Bend your ear.
Come close and let us meld our voices
and allow a song of joyful defiance
to rise unbroken as we stare down
this false struggle.

Are we not one?
Do we not come from dust and shall we not
return to our Maker, equal
in our failures and
in our wandering?

Are we not the same?

Even in your protest I hear the echo
of my own humanness that would make you
other for all the necessary reasons.
Taste now these tears of mine
like unto your own.

Let us drink from the cup we share
and bless it with our presence and attention,
for we are the same,
you and I.