May I share my poem?

[backtoblue]

I wrote this a few months ago, but wanted to share it with everyone. It helps me cope with things by turning my feelings into poems. The migrant children being locked up and separated from their families hits me on such a visceral level.

Here goes.

The Angel

The Angel sheds tears as she sings
A song so sad that it stings
The children were taken
Their innocence forsaken
The weight of their cries on her wings

How did the world grow so hateful and cold?
Compassion traded for bars of gold
Greed for the tallest tower
Drunk on their lust for power
For coins their souls were sold

Her wings trembled with anger and ire
She confronted the kings of the empire
The men would not yield
Every one of them she killed
Their palaces destroyed by fire

[ebbie15644]

1. beautiful and fitting

[backtoblue]

2. Thank you for reading ebbie

To see such atrocities and have no power to stop it is deflating and sickening.

[ebbie15644]

3. your welcome!

[JudyM]

4. So poignant. Poetry can wake us up. We need all hands on deck these days.

[backtoblue]

5. We need our creativity back

I can't argue with the locals about politics. But once I share a poem like this they seem to open up their conscience a little. Maybe grassroots is doing the little things to spread the word.

[JudyM]

10. Yes! Frontal attacks don't get through their minds' defenses like poetry or a story can.

[backtoblue]

11. The worst ones around here are the "diner boys"

Our small town diner is where the local men go to drink coffee and hate on liberals. They're polite, but me being a younger female, they dismiss my input.

If I ever needed help they would rush to be there though. It's an odd catch 22 and its baffling to me.

They don't like my opinions, but if I share my artwork or poems, they really seem to like them.

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the front line.

[JudyM]

13. Sounds like you are! Keep on, sister.

[MLAA]

6. Excellent, the emotion is cutting, visceral. You hit the mark!

[backtoblue]

7. Thank you MLAA!

We've got to get those families back together. Reading tends to open the mind to empathy, so I'm going to share this with my local community. I hope I can write a few more soon.

[Tanuki]

8. Speaking of angels and poems....Martin Espada's Imagine the Angels of Bread

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/power-of-one/2266

"This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts
the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth; this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorum,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horsebackare not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread."

— Martín Espada

[backtoblue]

9. Oh I like that

This is the year! I can feel the drumbeat behind the words. Thank you!

[myohmy2]

12. +1

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