Diverse Voices

DIVERSE VOICES

How drab the world
the racists would build for us
without bright colours or spices
only the endless sterile white
of their own self-regard and ignorance

I weep when I hear
Leela Soma talk in her lilting accent
about her identity
half and half, Glasgow and Bombay
Scotland and India

Because we are all homeless
under this sun with the hollow hearts
we are forced to carry, hungry for a love
that only a god as yet unmade or named
might one day fill for us.

Man and woman, all creatures
are fragments of the god
who broke himself that we might live
and removed his image from the world
in the ultimate act of modesty.

Rebuild him. Gather back
the living clues we have:
his wondrous children resplendent
in their many forms whose tongues
will not make Babel with their praise

but music sublime beyond comparison.