A Slave and a Queen in my dream

CATEGORY

I had dinner with two of my ancestors,
1,000 years apart,
A slave and a queen,
I don't know who I was more in awe of,
My challenges and failures seemed like utopian fiction to them,
My worst day would be each’s heaven,
We wondered how we were able to span generations and break the rules of time,
Speaking with the past and the future in the flesh,
Our words translated via subtitled videos in our minds,
Shared facial features that ached from smiling and laughing at the impossibility of our experience,
From the Queen, I learned that history edits and embellishes more often than we know,
Yet when the world was smaller and younger,
People were more the same,
Wonderful, flawed, ambitious and evolving,
From the slave, I learned how a lifetime of terror can sharpen one’s mind, body, and soul,
I fear they learned nothing from me,
A common man in a modern world who has flown across the globe, and has forgot more things than the scholars of their time,
With such an abundance of freedom that it leaves him paralyzed,
While royals waste and rule the enslaved rebel and seek freedom,
In the empire of America we don't really struggle, we simply exist to consume,
1,000 years from now, what will my progeny be?