Author’s Note

This is about feeling cognitively out of place.

About being able to hold two truths at once – and watching compassion shrink the moment identity enters the room.

— Rowan Evans

Crash Landed
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I’m an outsider.
I’ve felt it all my life,
I just don’t fit in.
Feel like I’m from
worlds away—
a farmer on Pluto,
librarian on Mars.

Mapping constellations,
navigating through stars.

But here I am
stuck on Earth.
I must have crash landed.
Because there’s no way
that they and I are the same.
Different patterns
mapped on the brain.

They look
only at the self,
I look beyond
at everyone else.

They don’t know
you can hold two truths,
with neither
being a lie.
You can be happy
evil was erased,
but angry
that to do it,
children had to die.

I will never understand
this tribal mentality—
how compassion gets selective
the moment a flag is raised.
Lines drawn in sand
while the tide keeps coming.

I will never understand
why empathy collapses
the moment
identity enters the room.

If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]