My first draft, in June 2018, was titled, “I Am Human.” It had no “We,” only “I.” A friend said, "This is not how the world sees you." She said women are treated differently than men and black people are treated differently than whites. She concluded by saying, if I thought otherwise I was "in denial . . . [or] mentally ill."

I thanked her for her feedback and explained my poem wasn’t intended to be about how the world sees people. On the contrary, it was about who we are, how God sees us, and how we should see one another—without judgement, categories or qualifiers. People aren’t treated the same, but they should be. They should all receive fairness and compassion. And they will be when we start seeing everyone without labels and devision, when we see them, instead, as divine beings. No label or classification supersedes our humanness or our divinity.

I'm tired of categories and divisions. People do it reflexively. They don't even realize it. News stories begin with one-word descriptors of race, gender, political affiliation, or nationality, often intended to discredit the message or action of the person involved. When we are simply and wholly human, we are in our most noble form. When we are fully human, we are divine.

A year after posting that first version, I tweaked it and replaced each vertical pronoun with We. I adjusted a few words and deleted distracting punctuation. A friend helped me format it on this nice graphic. Could it change again in the future? Definitely. Things evolve, including me.

Life is about learning, growing, accepting, loving and, ultimately, becoming one. When we are one, we are, at once, our most human and our most divine.