My mother said education is the key.
Did she lie?
Or was she lied to by those who held the lock and sipped tea?

Because all I see doesn’t match what she dreamed.
I strive night and day to be worthy of her sacrifice,
Her pride, her strength.
Running on a story that I’d make life better, easier.
I just have to pay for a key.

When I sit in the four walls of a classroom,
They say learn.
But did they teach us survival?
Adaptability?
Or just compliance?

I think of her watching me sleep, holding a wicker lamp,
The unpaid loans sitting quietly in the dark beside her,
Telling herself it’s for the greater good.

Funny, because the world isn’t for the greater good.
The world is for the greater rich.

Before we learn the language, they change the alphabet.
Before we evolve, there is another system waiting.

In a country are moving metals making life easier,
Machines that learn faster than the loans can be repaid,
At home are moving humans
Still holding on to a scrappy promise that probably got missed.

Mom.
They said education is the key.
Now they say it will be irrelevant.
I don’t know how to tell you.
I don’t know how to give back what you carried.

What would they sell to the next generation?
Emotional intelligence is the key.

Say the lock is opened.
Winning trophies — a one way ticket,
Building their utopia while we collect dust.
Their utopia is also on fire
They just have better words for the smoke.

There is a smokescreen and we’re the audience.
We pit ourselves against one another,
Forgetting we all came from the same mother.

There is no key. They enforce the locks.
She wasn’t lied to — she is but a victim of a regulated facade.
One that feeds from us, lies to us,
Certain we’d never wake up.

Will you?

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Kyle Larivee on Unsplash