A World of Glass

By Cathy Sheng

I’ve always had glasses, to me it offers me separation, protection in a world full of chaos and injustices. This is a poem about overcoming vulnerabilities, seeing the unfiltered world, and molding a better world.

The world is full of glass
Pairs upon pairs balanced on my wobbling head
	Cowering behind them at school
Making bean-like indents into my nose 
Trying to disappear behind them
A shield    
Leaking tears outline my face
	Bloody streams from hidden wounds
My insides tighten like a readied weapon 
	Battling against the ceaseless storm 

Shards of glass slice off my vulnerabilities 
Glass grips my heart
An impenetrable case
Drowning I sink below the weight of
 Glass
		Glass
			Glass 

So many glass walls
	Untouchable surfaces
		Unbreakable barriers
			Unchangeable laws
 
Glasses upon all our heads
	To shut out atrocities
		Bear the wretchedness with a covered eye
			Perceive a better vision in our jagged world
			 	Mute our presence

Beautiful in each of our own ways
	Our unique cultures, an ornament of pride
		Our ancestry, a story we carry in our heart
			Our language, a mesmerizing song  

But glasses are breakable, the world is not static
No need for correcting glasses to adjust our society
The world was not meant to be experienced through plexiglass

We cannot fix our society
By looking through a rose-colored lens
Lose ourselves in false illusions
Dreamy mirages do not mend flaws
A world through warped filters
Is a glass prism without colors

In the vision of equity,
	Places are carved for us all
No matter our origin, no matter our roots
There’s beauty in all identities, we shall
Discover and share
		Care and empathize
			Equalize and accept
Use affection not bigoted division to orbit the world

The world is full of glasses
One by one I yearn to take them off
Step out from the shadowed security of glasses
Perceive the world in all its vividness
	Dims and glows
Stitch a better world for diversity
Vision by vision

Process

After a series of poetry writing exercises, I fell in love with the flexibility of the form. I wrote about my friends, my brothers, my favorite office supplies. I really enjoyed being able to use a single ordinary item to illuminate larger themes like equity and anxiety.

This poem went through multiple drafts, getting deeper and deeper the more I dug into this idea of glasses as a metaphor for how we hide, how we see, how we admire the world around us. They have the potential to offer total clarity, just as much as they have the potential to warp our perspective.