Us and Them

By Ramin Gillett

Maybe we all forget what’s most familiar,
because what’s most familiar
is the air we breathe,
which, like our own scent,
is only odorless to us.

Watching you was like watching
someone I should know
stumbling through life,
oblivious of how beautiful
he truly is.

From his childhood years in a small mountain town in West Africa to a chance encounter with a food vendor in Haiti, Ramin Gillett’s first collection of poetry, Us and Them, explores the delicate tension that exists between the ways we alienate each other and our collective desire for identity and belonging.

Ramin draws upon his unique background of navigating multiple cultural realities to explore the vastness and diversity of the human landscape, simultaneously challenging us to go beyond our narrow lenses and embrace a larger reality, one that allows for forgiveness and healing.

Us and Them illuminates what it means to be alive in an age of intensifying polarization and xenophobia. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yoke & Abundance Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889266327

Book preview

Artboard_2.png

Us and Them

Us and Them

Ramin Gillett

Copyright © 2023 Ramin Gillett

All rights reserved.

Us and Them

ISBN

979-8-88926-631-0 Paperback

979-8-88926-632-7 Ebook

For the family we are struggling to become.

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

Why We Love Poetry

Neither Here nor There

Elephant Grass

Mangoes

A Girl Called Light

First Subway Ride

Where Have You Been?

Hayti, 2016

The Return

Warm Winters

A Pandemic Story

Time

The Gift of Loneliness

On Friendship, and More

Death Is the Loneliest Journey

The Law of Pain

Series

The Immigrant Story

Obscurement of Pain

unfinished business

Laws of Nature

Lies

Rates of Exchange

The Bankruptcy of Feeling

our reflection

How It Will End

Where They Went

An-other

Schrödinger

A Paralysis

$20.64

phil-an-thrope

A Clarification

Veins Like Lace

cosmic

Veneer

Bad Lands

A Little Background

On War

Phantasmagoria

In Celebration of Small Things

Child of the Earth

For Whom Do You Cry?

Glass Houses

For the Missing Boy

For Mahsa

Principles of Change

Will You Do This?

How to Love

On Forgiveness

Two Roads

Gratitudes

The men where you live, said the little prince, raise five thousand roses in the same garden—and they do not find in it what they are looking for.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Author’s Note

In my dreams, I’m still a child running down a dusty road by a river near the house I grew up in. My feet hit the soft warm earth, and a cloud of dust trails behind me for as far as my small legs carry me. Even though it’s winter and the rains haven’t come yet, I know the water spirit, Mami Wata, lurks in the shadows ready to steal me away. My parents are at home waiting for me, and all I want is to drown in their love. 

Some lives seem distant, like a faraway galaxy you can never quite reach. Maybe this is why I write poetry. 

I live in the Appalachian Mountains now, and just the other morning it started to snow again. I’m not as young as I used to be, and Cameroon feels like a lifetime away. There was a time we chased grasshoppers as the sun went down, and streetlights lit up the southern sky. We put the grasshoppers into bags, filled to the brim,