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(Note: In this abecedarian poem, I redacted the name of the particular denomination to protect the innocent and to universalize the context. Fill in your own favorite groups! Prejudice against those perceived to be “other” than “us” infiltrates human hearts no matter the identity or extent of the difference.)

Closed Community Prejudice (an Alphabetized Memoir)

By Mark D. Stucky
Almost everyone in my home community
belonged to _________ churches.
Churches not _________ (like Methodist and Lutheran)
didn’t seem “right” somehow, although nobody whispered it.
Every other group was less homogenous than us,
fated to be born “different” from us.
Good people maybe.
However,
inferior to us surely.
Just not quite like us.
Knew them only superficially.
Looked like us on the outside.
Maybe not that different after all?
No, they weren’t the same ethnicity as us.
Otherness lurked inside them.
…
Perhaps prejudices in all people,
     quietly
     rise
     slowly
     toward
     unholy
     vantage points.
What if
xenophobes, like
you and me, could
zero out all our distortions?

(Originally published as "Closed Community Memoir (Alphabetized)" in Reflecting on Race Through Poetry, a collection of participant poems from a class at First United Methodist Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1 Nov. 2000. See also my poems "Races," "Weapons of Wonder," and "Hate Vacuuming?")

(Original image by Braden Collum on Pexels.com.)

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