Nobody apologises to a garden for the wrong shade of red. That small, slightly absurd thought drives xO.lani.Xo's «What about us», eight short lines built as an argument by comparison. We don't shame flowers for being "to tall or to short," "to pink or to red." We "just embrace" them. So why, the poem asks, don't we do the same "with ourselves"? The central idea is that we already know how to accept difference, because we do it without effort whenever we look at a flower, and what stops us from turning that acceptance inward is habit, not inability.
The poem is free verse: no rhyme, no punctuation, no fixed metre. That suits its plain, spoken tone, and the line breaks do the work a rhyme scheme might otherwise do. The first line is the longest and runs on as if listing complaints, and after that the lines shrink. "We just embrace / Them for being / Their unique beauty" splits one sentence into three small steps, so the reader has to slow down. The break after "embrace" leaves the verb alone for a moment, and the word "just" makes the act sound easy, almost automatic. Then comes a quiet grammatical surprise. The flowers are embraced "for being / Their unique beauty," not for having it. Taken literally, the flower doesn't possess beauty as a feature that might be too much or too little. It is the beauty.
The examples are chosen with more care than they first appear. Tall and short are opposites, but pink and red are close neighbours on the colour wheel. The shaming being mocked starts with a big difference and shrinks to a barely visible one, which makes the whole habit look petty. The word "to," which reads as "too," carries a second point. "Too" is a judgement that only makes sense against a standard, and the poem never says what that standard is. Too tall for what? Too red compared with what? Flowers have no such measure, and that absence exposes how arbitrary the measure is when we apply it to people. The spellings "to" and "doint" give the writing an unpolished, talking-aloud quality, like a thought said to a friend rather than composed for display, and the argument doesn't need polish to land.
One stray capital also catches the eye. Every line begins with a capital letter, but "Shame" sits in the middle of the first line with one too, and whether by accident or design it makes the key word stand out. It is the right word to stand out, because shame is what the poem is really about. The poem never says what we are ashamed of, whether looks, personality or something else, so readers can fill the gap with their own experience.
The ending turns on a pronoun. The "we" who calmly embraces flowers is the same "we" who needs to be asked, "Why doint we start." The word "start" is the poem's most honest moment, because it admits, almost in passing, that we haven't begun. Like the title, the final question has no question mark. It reads less like a puzzle waiting for an answer and more like a gentle challenge. The title, «What about us», sounds like the cry of someone left out of a kindness being handed to everything else, and the closing line answers it by placing "ourselves" last, where the poem's weight falls.
Part of the poem's force comes from how hard it is to argue against. Few people would defend scolding a flower, so once the comparison is made, the double standard is hard to unsee. The poem doesn't lecture or issue commands. It asks, and lets the contrast do the persuading. Even the signature seems to join in: the name is wrapped in "xO" and "Xo," characters often used as shorthand for hugs and kisses, which happens to echo the poem's key verb, "embrace." The result is a short poem that makes a modest-looking point and then leaves the reader holding a question, which is a good reason to remember it.