Can or Should Poetry Cry for Justice?
Yes.
There is a lack of much justice in so much of the present world. How do we fight it? How can we approach it? How can we solve any problem? Be aware. Without knowledge of the injustices, there is ignorance and nothing to act on.
China represses its people,
Supposedly for the better good.
Next door is North Korea,
Where things are likely worse.
Where else?
Many other places,
Before we return to the streets and climes of our own lucky spheres-
This bizarre neighbor of kowtowed China, but even more awful
Brainwashing
Hunger
Forced labor
Missiles and bombs instead of sustenance and nutrition
Poetic, no?
Dark, dismal arts
Which art may and should evoke
Like a Shakespearean play, a Miller drama, a Sheppard narrative
A Samuel Beckett existentialist spectacle and a humbling nightmare
The Sudanese rape and kill each other
They like many do not see each other as one color on the map
As we do
As Somalia is three, not one
And we, the greatest power in the world for eighty plus years,
Target their "youth", known as the Shabab
We hit them constantly and in droves
As we have in other jihadi populated lands
Mali and Burkina Faso - threats and violence
Libya has calmed down from what I know
I have not heard, nor read
But other parts of the Dark Continent, as perhaps us racists we say
Have their poverty, upheaval, and ruin
While others are doing well
Perhaps better than ever
For millions
Not all hope is lost
Venezuela
Is not hemorrhaging the millions like a few short years ago
But thousands of other Latin American lands still flee and leave
Not to mention the ongoing catastrophe of Haiti
We have violence and crime across Mexico
As much of the worst places of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean
But we are not at war as Russia and Ukraine
Or Azerbaijanis pushing the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh
Starving them, it seems
So, madness and mayhem live on
Injustice touched upon in this poem
What else? There are civil rights, economic rights, sexual preference and identity rights
All these plus privileges and luxuries
While alas, the plight of Gaza and Israel,
The West Bank and no state but the Eretz Israel
Zionism is not always kind to anyone
Such is the trajectory since Abraham, or before...
Christians, Muslims, and Hindus and even Sinhalese Buddhists
We cannot escape
The injustices of our histories
Trashing the planet, one polluted stream or river at a time
Into our oceans and other places,
Including the spaces of our atmospheres and space
Itself
Even the universe cries for the injustice of our collective meddling
So, yes, I say the poetry cries
The birds and small creatures cry
The larger beasts and creatures
To include and encompass our forests and jungles,
Our oceans and glaciers
Our skies and very consciences, psyches
( I have forgotten the rubbish and vitriol and inhumanity of our alleged
ARTS
Film, music, literature of trash and pornography.
Yes, we should all cry for justice, for fairness, for opportunity,
Freedom from want, from oppression, from pain and force of mind and spirit
Freedom to choose and elect our own ways and peoples.
Yes, we should cry, always, for justice.
In poetry or no.
