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.