109 Social justice poems

locate the closest overlooked neighborhood — at its core extract all humans living underneath life’s bootheel. replace with millennials cradling postcolonial guilt, but not. ignore the woman’s cardboard [ help ] sign tattered, stained & broken like her: imagine being long-ago unseen, erased in between the throng, an existing non-entity. ask, too, if gun be an instrument what refrain whizzed soundless amid crestfallen shadows lingering a decade. go from “a to z” to list the dead — too many to name, but try: antoine, byrd, carlos, delante ... no deader now than then. still a memory real, cold steel, shots fired — death, what did we know of dying? don’t forget love, a love strangling addicts caught in a docetic whirlwind with no blue sail. before the corner becomes distorted remember: one more time inhale deep. inhale memory to include the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.

for Dianne McIntyre as i fly over this time rising over only this so much painted suffering unseen grimaces and stares among spruce greens these few forests left all of us trying to be alone quiet and blind. * i see soldiers in bus stations with colored names polaroid shots their girlfriends chew gum smile wide * in all this silver of sky like stars these wheels car gears lampshades electrical refuse zen oiled and greased the believers now so many now so tired of the sad songs the endless yearnings for war and more and more * dumb cries i sigh trying to get out of town i am writing on the wall it will be painted over like all the songs once outside but as i fly over this time * dianne is dancing touching the far reaches leaping and teaching she strokes and struts the air none of us stumbles or fears their lives steel beams and rail tracks strike an E-flat, B-flat, A E-flat, B-flat, A dianne is dancing no one can handle the hostages terror is abandoned because of light breaking in leaves because the center is gone we are still breathing and the swing is our bodies

Brown gas-fog, white beneath the street lamps. Cut off on three sides, all space filled with our bodies. Bodies that stumble in brown airlessness, whitened in light, a mildew glare, that stumble hand in hand, blinded, retching. Wanting it, wanting to be here, the body believing it’s dying in its nausea, my head clear in its despair, a kind of joy, knowing this is by no means death, is trivial, an incident, a fragile instant.    Wanting it, wanting with all my hunger this anguish, this knowing in the body the grim odds we’re up against, wanting it real. Up that bank where gas curled in the ivy, dragging each other up, strangers, brothers and sisters.    Nothing will do but to taste the bitter taste. No life other, apart from.

After you finish your work after you do your day after you've read your reading after you've written your say – you go down the street to the hot dog stand, one block down and across the way. On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century. Most of the windows are boarded up, the rats run out of a sack – sticking out of the crummy garage one shiny long Cadillac; at the glass door of the drug-addiction center, a man who'd like to break your back. But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too. Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel where the hot-dog-man leans – nothing else on the counter but the usual two machines, the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty, I face him in between. A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking. I watch the man as he stands and pours in the familiar shape bright purple in the one marked ORANGE orange in the one marked GRAPE, the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE and orange drink in the GRAPE. Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each machine. I ask him : How can we go on reading and make sense out of what we read? – How can they write and believe what they're writing, the young ones across the street, while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE –? (How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?) He looks at the two machines and he smiles and he shrugs and smiles and pours again. It could be violence and nonviolence it could be white and black          women and men it could be war and peace or any binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend. Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do. On a corner in East Harlem garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape, forgetfulness, a hot street of murder, misery, withered hope, a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE, pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

I. The time has come for the nation to turn a new page by righting wrongs of the past. We apologise for laws and policies that inflicted profound grief, suffering, and loss and for the removal of children from families, communities, and country. For the pain of these, their descendants, and for families left behind, to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, for indignity inflicted on a proud people, we say sorry. We resolve that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again and look to a future based on mutual respect, where all, whatever their origins, are equal partners. Spoken by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, introduced in January and delivered November 29, 2008, the day after he was sworn into office

Soft songs, like birds, die in poison air So my song cannot now be candy. Anger rots the oak and elm; roses are rare, Seldom seen through blind despair. And my murmur cannot be heard Above the din and damn. The night is full Of buggers and bastards; no moon or stars Light the sky. And my candy is deferred Till peacetime, when my voice shall be light, Like down, lilting in the air; then shall I Sing of beaches, white in the magic sun, And of moons and maidens at midnight.

Is like a lyric poem with seven basic themes first the cottonpicker dragging behind it a wagon of testicles a pair of pliers which can fill in for a cross in a pinch then there is the warm pond between the maiden’s thighs next we have some friends of yours and mine who shall be with us always Pablo the artist the pubis of the moon Pablo the cellist panther of silence Pablo the poet the point of no return and in case of emergency the seventh and final theme of this systematic poem is the systematic way death undresses in front of you

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago. Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread.Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh. Alabanza.

for Deshawn, Eric, Dallas, Jerome & Lerone We brown boys play stick games, say nicknames like B IG D, E VIL E; and conjure Knievel with jigsawed dirt bikes and sewer curbs for asphalt launch pads. We all sweat to know flight for just a minute. We brown boys, hair all knaps, wear ballcaps’ broken brims. Broken rims from hungry slamdunks, pro-ball pipe dreams over ice cream man’s “Pop Goes the Weasel.” We all hunt change from cords’, Bermudas and mamas. We brown boys— smack talking slap boxing— stay bragging and bagging, drinking summer from hoses and water bomb barrages. We throw rocks at garages making no dents. We all just trying to leave a mark.

The number of bodies i have is equal to the number of gurney transfers that are televised. If we’re all “just human” then who is responsible? A fire station drying out from addiction. outside the drizzling of firepower, lowballing suns it’s like a sauna in here. the strain of a charred bladder. bottled water bad wiring, that spark is no good come sit with me for a minute. my feet full of diluted axe fluid thought I heard you say everything is medicine but that’s just hearin what you wanna hear