Note: Personal tragedy or pain can be a source of witness, but only as it applies
to more universal social issues.
Outcome
As mentioned above, this will be a part of your grade for the
poetry unit. In addition, up to 3 student poems will be chosen for display
at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park. If chosen, your poetry would
be on display for the thousands of visitors to the History Museum throughout
the spring.
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Sample Poems
These poems will serve as valuable examples of poems of witness.
Read through them and use any that touch you personally as models for your
own poetry.
Other People's Troubles
Stanzas Against Forgetting, 1955
Let America be America Again
Harvest of Hate
I Have Seen Black Hands
Lifting the Stone
Other People's
Troubles by Jason Sommer
The Jewish parable goes
that in the waiting room
where all souls come, they leave
a bundle of their troubles
on hooks. At their return,
emerging from interviews,
they eye the parcels hung
in hundreds on the walls
with care, and take their own.
Trash night, curbside sits
a little sofa meant
for the taking, no one around
even to see our need.
A few speculatable stains,
though in the abstract forest
on its cover, shadows turn out
to be not impeded streetlight
but the body's unguent,
armrests oiled by arms.
We leave the sofa there,
sturdy and recoverable,
life in it yet.
Lilly said that on
the rim of Birkenau,
before the women heard
the name or saw the chimneys'
fires and long shadows
of ash, but after stripping,
herding, shearing, searching,
the unhinged laughter at this,
the only nakedness of its kind
in their lives, a minute
of dribbled shower, the slap
of disinfectant -- scalp
crotch and underarms --
the mad clothes thrown at them
without regard for fit,
rag remnants of gowns,
tattered cocktail dresses'
satin, tulle, and crepe
put on -- more laughter then:
Who are these scarecrows who
are us? But not one of them --
the heavy woman choked
inside the sheath skirt
with the slender girl tenting
in a gown with a train; not
the tall woman bound
in the arms of the short dress,
pullin it down to cover
her thighs, with the small woman
hiking up folds -- no one
would trade with anyone
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Stanzas Against Forgetting,
1955 by Guillaume Apollinaire
You asked neither for glory nor tears
Nor an organ nor prayers for the dying
Eleven years now already eleven years
All you did was simply take up arms
Death does not blind the eyes of partisans
On the walls of our towns your faces
Blackbearded, wild and menacing
Were spattered like blood-stains to frighten passers-by
And moreover your names were foreign and difficult to pronounce
No one seemed to see you, you who were French by choice
People averted their eyes from you all day
But during black-out, wandering hands
Wrote DIED FOR FRANCE under your photographs
And thanks to that the mornings were less bleak
By the end of February when your last hour arrived
Everything was the uniform color of frost
It was then that one of you calmly said
Bless you all, bless you all who will survive
I die without hatred for the German people
Adieu to sorrow and to pleasure Adieu to the roses
Adieu to life and to light and to the wind
Get married, be happy and think of me often
You who will remain in the beauty of things
When it's all over in Erivan
A full winter sun lights the hills
How beautiful nature is, how broken my heart
But justice will soon follow in our triumphant steps
My beloved, o my darling, my orphaned love
I implore you to live and bear a child
They numbered twenty-three when the guns flowered
Twenty-three who gave their hearts before their time
Twenty-three foreigners who were our brothers
Twenty-three who loved life unto death
Twenty-three who called out La France as they fell
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Let America be America
Again by Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold!
Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
A dream --
Still beckoning to me!
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--
the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--
T the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME --
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
An ever-living seed,
Its dream
Lies deep in the heart of me.
We, the people, must redeem
Our land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain --
All, all the stretch of these great green states --
And make America again!
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Harvest of Hate by
Wole Soyinka
So now the sun moves to die at mid-morning
And laughter wilts on the lips of wine
The fronds of plam are savaged to a bristle
And rashes break on kernelled oil
The hearth is pocked with furnacing of teeth
The air is heavy with rise of incense
For wings womb-moist from the sanctuary of nests
Fall, unfledged to the tribute of fire.
Now pay we forfeit on old abdications
The child dares flames his fathers lit
And in the briefness of too bright flares
Shrivels a heritae of blighted futures
There has been such a crop in time of growing
Such tuneless noiswes when we longed for sighs
Alone of petals, for muted swell of wine-buds
In August rains, and singing in green spaces.
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I Have Seen Black Hands
by Wright, Richard
I
I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions
of them,
Out of millions of bundles of wool and flannel tiny black fingers have reached
restlessly and hungrily for life.
Reached out for the black nipples at the black breasts of black mothers,
And they've held red, green, blue, yellow, orange, white, and purple toys
in the childish grips of possession.
And chocolate drops, peppermint sticks, lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones,
and sugared cookies in fingers sticky and gummy,
And they've held balls and bats and gloves and marbles and jack-knives and
sling-shots and spinning tops in the thrill of sport and play.
And pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and sometimes on New Year's,
Easter, Lincoln's Birthday, May Day, a brand new green dollar bill,
They've held pens and rulers and maps and tablets and books in palms spotted
and smeared with ink,
And they've held dice and cards and half-pink flasks and cue sticks and cigars
and cigarettes in the pride of new maturity...
II
I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions
of them
They were tired and awkward and calloused and grimy and covered with hangnails,
And they were caught in the fast-moving belts of machines and snagged and
smashed and crushed.
And they jerked up and down at the throbbing machines massing taller and taller
the heaps of gold in the banks of bosses,
And they piled higher and higher the steel, iron, the lumber, wheat, rye,
the oats, corn, the cotton, the wool, the oil, the coal, the meat, the fruit,
the glass, and the stone until there was too much to be used,
And they grabbed guns and slung them on their shoulders and marched and groped
in trenches and fought and killed and conquered nations who were customers
for the goods black hands had made.
And again black hands stacked goods higher and higher until there was too
much to be used,
III
I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions
of them
Reaching hesitantly out of days of slow death for the goods they had made,
but the bosses warned that the goods were private and did not belong to them,
And the black hands struck desperately out in defence of life and there was
blood, but the enraged bosses decreed that this too was wrong,
And the black hands felt the cold steel bars of the prison they had made,
in despair tested their strength and found that they could neither bend nor
break them,
And the black hands fought and scratched and held back but a thousand white
hands took them and tied them,
And the black hands lifted palms in mute and futile supplication to the sodden
faces of mobs wild in the revelries of sadism,
And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at the noose
that tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that cooked
and charred the black flesh. . .
IV
I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fits of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers,
And some day-and it is only this which sustains me
Some day there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!
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Lifting the Stone
by Jason Sommer
Not when I call them do the pictures come:
I intend to sleep, and a landscape I never knew
I noted reels by as if seen from a car --
tufted grass backed by a stand of trees,
or a cityscape of gray apartment houses
remembered for no reason that I know of,
not backdrop for events, just incidental
music played between the acts, a scene
to watch as scenes change, till a blurry image
of a wooden shack in New York state somewhere,
equally random-seeming at first, clarifies
as one of the oddly assorted places
my father pointed out for its resemblance
to the hut that he was born in.
I'm nowhere then,
abstracting his story out of its settings,
wanting to think of it as a large stone,
a boulder under which are things I need.
The straw-roofed Czech village, and the camps
with the strung wire through which the dark eyes plead
like droning whole notes on a musical staff,
a diagram of sorrow, are a stone
which I, a Theseus, putting off majority,
can't lift
And even imagining I can
takes the forms of my anxious dreaming.
I struggle from room to room in some cold warren
and the class has moved, or Zeyde's deathbed
is in thirty-four, a stern attendant says,
as if I should know. So these are the Chinese boxes.
The shrinking gift sequentially deferred,
the expectant rise defeated over and over
by another box. The earth conceals its bulk
until the stone is dug out, hugged up,
and below the stone is another, and under that
again a stone, on down into rooty dirt.
Inside the hole I have not properly pictured
in my mind but which in logic must be there,
I finally come to sword and sandals, but
they are tiny -- baby shoes, a toy sword.
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