Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Public Protest

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. 

Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.

― Bob Marley, Bob Marley - Legend

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy;

it is absolutely essential to it.
― Howard Zinn

Part of Chinese Democracy Movement in 1989:
Type 59 tanks on Tiananmen Square.   "Tank Man" 
is visible in the lower left blocking the entire army. 
(Photo by Stuart Franklin, via Wikipedia, Fair Use.)

TODAY is the sad 25th anniversary of the final confrontation 

of the Chinese Democracy Movement  on June 4th 1989.

Midweek Motif ~ Public Protest

Have you ever been moved to stand up to power?  Have you ever wielded the power that is protested?   I like it best when protest leads to positive negotiations.  Protest groups unite when negotiations failed and they are compelled to protest and strike.  Non-violent public protest has power to create change.  

Your challenge:  Either present an historical protest in an epic poem or create a lyric poem from inside a protest, or combine both, interlacing epic and lyric.

Anti-nuclear Power Plant Rally on 19 September 2011 at Meiji Shrine complex in Tokyo.
Sixty thousand people marched chanting "Sayonara nuclear power" and waving banners to call on Japan's government to abandon nuclear power, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.^[1][2]

Inspiration from a three Poems:

graduate school first semester: so here I am writing about Indians again

BY CHERYL SAVAGEAU

“The conquest is not sustainable . . .”
                                  —Winona LaDuke

thanks for bringing that

to our attention

she said the first time

to my response to a history text

about a famous painting

of the Battle of Quebec

that never mentioned the French

and only mentioned Indians twice,

once as nuisances, once

as the noble savage

kneeling by the dying

English general . . . .  

(See the rest of this poem at The Poetry Foundation)

Howl

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . . .

(See the rest of this poem at The Poetry Foundation) 

Ballad of Birmingham

BY DUDLEY RANDALL

(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)

“Mother dear, may I go downtown

Instead of out to play,

And march the streets of Birmingham

In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,

For the dogs are fierce and wild,

And clubs and hoses, guns and jails

Aren't good for a little child.”

“But, mother, I won’t be alone.

Other children will go with me,

And march the streets of Birmingham

To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,

For I fear those guns will fire.

But you may go to church instead

And sing in the children’s choir.”

. . . . 

(See the rest of this poem at The Poetry Foundation.)

Please:  

1.      Post your public protest poem  on your site, and then link it here.

2.      Share only original and new work written for this challenge. 

3.      Leave a comment here.

4.      Honor our community by visiting and commenting on others' poems.

(Next week's Midweek Motif is  the number 13.)

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