Powerful Poem About Race Gets A Full Page In The New York Times

[kpete]

It’s a poem about protest, and the emotional and practical reasons protest becomes necessary. It’s also a poem about loving your country, but feeling as though you’re not truly a part of it.

It’s a poem that’s needed right now, which is why The New York Times dedicated an entire page to it in its print edition today.


http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57e3d857e4b08d73b82fbc0f

[No Vested Interest]

1. Beautiful - and powerful. nt

[malaise]

2. Love his work

I have an original copy of a wonderful Anthology -The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1970 edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps.

Check out his Birmingham Sunday - September 15, 1963
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/9/15/1238527/-Birmingham-Sunday

Over the years there have been many memorials written or sung about that day.

Langston Hughes wrote:

Four little girls
Who went to Sunday School that day
And never came back home at all--
But left instead
Their blood upon the wall
With spattered flesh
And bloodied Sunday dresses
Scorched by dynamite that
China made eons ago
Did not know what China made
Before China was ever Red at all
Would ever redden with their blood
This Birmingham-on-Sunday wall.
Four tiny little girls
Who left their blood upon that wall,
In little graves today await:
The dynamite that might ignite
The ancient fuse of Dragon Kings
Whose tomorrow sings a hymn
The missionaries never taught
In Christian Sunday School
To implement the Golden Rule.
Four little girls
Might be awakened someday soon
By songs upon the breeze
As yet unfelt among
Magnolia trees.

One of my favorites remains Claude McKay's If we Must Die
By Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

[awoke_in_2003]

4. and another poet for the list...

thanks.

[awoke_in_2003]

3. K&R

I am getting into poetry- I will put his name on my list.