It was the Europeans who taught indigenous people shame,
beginning with the covering up of intimate parts.
Other civilizations were luckier.
Morality was handed to them ready-made from above, inscribed on stone tablets.
Where I grew up, morality had a form, body, and name:
Cain, unremorseful Mary Magdalene, Ruth, Delilah, and Rachel.
Morality was easily pointed at by a seven-year-old’s ink-stained finger.
Perfect examples of vice or virtue where time lays its eggs on a
swamp.
And so I received the first lessons in morality without chewing them like
cough syrup; other things happened more abstractly and under a chaste roof.
And strangely, even the second generation didn’t disappoint: their descendants became
another Cain, another Ruth, another Mary Magdalene who never grew up.
Clichés were simultaneously risky and protective for them,
like trying to use dry snow to make an igloo.
Now I know so much more about morality.
In fact, I actually could be a moralist,
pointing my index finger out as a rhetorical gesture.
But without referring to anyone. Where did everyone go?
A door opened by accident.
Light broke through by force
and, as in a dark room,
erased their silver bromide portraits which were once flesh and bone.
