Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment

 Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment

Why poetry is necessary and sought after during crises.

Pithy and powerful, poetry is a popular art form at protests and rallies. From the civil rights and women’s liberation movements to Black Lives Matter, poetry is commanding enough to gather crowds in a city square and compact enough to demand attention on social media. Speaking truth to power remains a crucial role of the poet in the face of political and media rhetoric designed to obscure, manipulate, or worse. The selection of poems below call out and talk back to the inhumane forces that threaten from above. They expose grim truths, raise consciousness, and build united fronts. Some insist, as Langston Hughes writes, “That all these walls oppression builds / Will have to go!” Others seek ways to actively “make peace,” as Denise Levertov implores, suggesting that “each act of living” might cultivate collective resistance. All rail against complacency and demonstrate why poetry is necessary and sought after in moments of political crisis.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/101581/poems-of-protest-resistance-and-empowerment

Bullet Points

 Bullet Points

BY JERICHO BROWN

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag, and if I do, 

I promise you, I will not do it

In a police car while handcuffed

Or in the jail cell of a town

I only know the name of

Because I have to drive through it

To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

But I promise you, I trust the maggots

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass more than I trust

An officer of the law of the land

To shut my eyes like a man

Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

So clean my mother could have used it

To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will

Do it the same way most Americans do, 

I promise you: cigarette smoke

Or a piece of meat on which I choke

Or so broke I freeze 

In one of these winters we keep

Calling worst. I promise if you hear

Of me dead anywhere near

A cop, then that cop killed me. He took 

Me from us and left my body, which is, 

No matter what we've been taught, 

Greater than the settlement

A city can pay a mother to stop crying,

And more beautiful than the new bullet

Fished from the folds of my brain.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152728/bullet-points

Riot

 RIOT

BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

A Poem in Three Parts

              A riot is the language of the unheard. 

              —Martin Luther King, Jr.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58377/riot-56d23cb395a01

Mob

 Mob

BY KEITH S. WILSON

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
                                    Gwendolyn Brooks, "Riot"

All day was filled with the floating dead

of clouds. Children

throwing birds, guns for thumbs

and forefingers. 

My heart is a mine shaft of canaries

and shells. 

My smell is filled with flying 

and what a sky this is.

The northern European still lifes

depicted so many flowers.

Lying on my side, looking. Where his eyes might be.

The dead teach us that kind of patience.

How different the drawings of a people must be 

who have always had this kind of time. 

               ***

A brief history of rope:

Some of us are brown

as starvation.

Happenstance is the color

of our eyes. 

               ***

What happens when you stare into the sun?

A crow is born. From here, I think

about the image of God.

He set jagged stars

in the square holes of us. 

               ***

And what are groups of us called?

It is an unkindness 

of ravens, for instance. For instance, 

                 a dole (an offering)

of doves. We've always been more glorious as a flock. 

Groups of us are congregations. 

What is more godlike than peace (other than insurgence),

than quiet, as of the breathing of evening

birds, the low warble of our people in the trees. 

               ***

Sometimes a dream is a fist you grow into,

but more often, a routine, like watering a weed in your stomach. 

               ***

We haven't been made afraid of trees. Nor the bottoms of cars. 

Windows, the gavel, the sea. 

​​​​​​​               ***

A feather is caught in the rapture of a fence, 

keeps struggling—can't come to terms—

cannot unthink that it's a bird. 

​​​​​​​               ***

What gives the ground the right

to gravity? No building. 

I want to widen the eyes of God. 

Every amendment has followed through

against our bodies. 

Icarus leapt. We will fly,

​​​​​​​be black together in the sun. 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152734/mob

Black Matters

 Black Matters

BY KEITH S. WILSON

after D.H. Lawrence

shall i tell you, then, that we exist?

there came a light, blue and white careening. 

the police like wailing angels

to bitter me. 

and so this:

dark matter is hypothetical. know

that it cannot be seen

in the gunpowder of a flower, 

in a worm that raisins on the concrete,

in a man that wills himself not to speak. 

gags, oh gags. 

for a shadow cannot breathe.

it deprives them of nothing. pride

is born in the black and then dies in it. 

i hear our shadow, low treble

of the clasping of our hands. 

dark matter is invisible.

we infer it: how light bends around a black body,

and still you do not see black halos, even here,

my having told you plainly where they are. 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152736/black-matters

This Is What I Know

 This Is What I Know

BY MUKOMA WA NGUGI

(*For LGBT Africans)

I know that Black people were sold as slaves because they were seen as

talking beasts of burden and Africans colonized for their own good;

and it was unnatural for women to operate heavy machinery let alone

operate on a brain.

I know that in the United States, Jim Crow used the rope to keep

black from white, and apartheid in South Africa killed for as little

as looking across the color line; and that intermarrying between the

races was a crime against God, Queen, and Country.

I know that a God of many names, the laws of many lands, science

and nature were used to justify slavery and colonialism, holocausts

and genocides, rapes and lynching.

I know that African dictators called those who fought for democracy

“puppets under the pay of foreign masters” and the foreign masters

called those same people communists and insurgents.

And this I know very well: that had the Sojourner Truths, Dedan

Kimathis, Martin Luther Kings, Malcom Xs, and Ruth Firsts failed,

my wife and I would not have crossed the color line and my daughter

would not have been possible.

I know that she, just like her mother and me, just like her

grandparents, will have her struggles, but it will BE a struggle waged

at the crossroad of many cultures and worlds.

So I must know that those before me did not die so that I could use

my freedom to put others in jail; or use the same laws that betrayed

them to enslave and torture.

I must know that if Steve Biko died so I could write what I like, then

my pen cannot become the weapon that justifies the torture and

murder of others.

How then can I not know that no one appointed me protector of

African cultural purity? How can I not know that I am not the

standard of all that is moral and natural?

What fortress is this I build that subjugates those within and keeps

those outside under siege? Whose moral law is this I use to judge?

Whose legal system to jail? Whose weapon to murder? And whose

tongue do I use to silence?

How can I, Black and African and blessed as I am by the struggles of

my fathers and mothers deny my gay brothers and sisters their rights?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153966/this-is-what-i-know

Rosa Parks

 Rosa Parks

BY NIKKI GIOVANNI

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-

place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.

The Song of the Feet

 The Song of the Feet

BY NIKKI GIOVANNI

It is appropriate that I sing

The song of the feet

 

The weight of the body

And what the body chooses to bear

Fall on me

 

I trampled the American wilderness

Forged frontier trails

Outran the mob in Tulsa

Got caught in Philadelphia

 

And am still unreparated

 

I soldiered on in Korea

Jungled through Vietnam sweated out Desert Storm

Caved my way through Afghanistan

Tunneled the World Trade Center

 

And on the worst day of my life

Walked behind JFK

Shouldered MLK

Stood embracing Sister Betty

 

I wiggle my toes

In the sands of time

Trusting the touch that controls my motion

Basking in the warmth of the embrace

Day’s end offers with warm salty water

 

It is appropriate I sing

The praise of the feet

 

I am a Black woman