Across Two Shadows

Across two shadows cast by time,

Two systems rise in different light—

One born in chains of ownership,

One forged in rules of state and right.

In fields where bodies once were claimed,

A life was written not by choice;

No contract, name, or lawful shield,

Just silence where there should be voice.

And now in walls of present day,

Where borders shape a waiting room,

A different cage, a temporary stay,

Yet echoes of restricted movement loom.

One shadow stretched through generations,

A legacy of lifelong bind;

The other holds a shifting span,

Days or years, but not a life defined.

Where one was built on stolen labor,

Economies carved from human pain,

The other houses restless souls,

Their labor small, their futures strained.

Both tether bodies, halt their steps,

Disrupt the ties of home and kin;

But one was carved from racial creed,

The other framed in laws of origin.

Still, questions rise in moral wind—

What makes confinement just or right?

What dignity survives a cage,

What suffering is lost from sight?

And so the past and present speak

Not as twins or mirrored forms,

But as two stations in a line

Where human freedom meets its storms.

To study both is not to blend

Their truths into a single name,

But let their lessons walk beside us—

Two shadows, cast by different flames.