What We Are

What we are? We say we want to become

what we are or what we have an intent to be.

We read the possibilities, or try.

We get to some. We think we know how to read.

We recognize a word, here and there,

a syllable: male, it says perhaps,

or female, talent -- look what you could do

or love, it says, love is what we mean.

Being at any cost: in the end, the cost

is terrible but so is the lure to us.

We see it move and shine and swallow it.

We say we are and this is what we are

as to say we should be and this is what to be

and this is how. But, oh, it isn’t so.

~ William Bronk

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All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself. ~ Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"