Words in Hard Times

Poems pre-date propaganda and will outlast it.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth
than history.
—Plato?

Throughout history, words have done a great deal of damage in our world. In ca. 515 BCE, Darius the Great established the massive Behistun Inscription, a cuneiform relief on the side of a cliff in Iran (and a UNESCO site). To the sciency geeks who discovered and studied it, its importance is as the longest known trilingual cuneiform inscription. To Darius, it was necessary to explain to his subjects why, having seized power from the late king’s brother, he had fought 19 battles within the following year to quash rebels. (It seems they were imposters and co-conspirators.)

Three hundred years later, Quintus Fabius Pictor (third century BCE) was the first to engage in what became a long Roman tradition of telling the story the way they wanted it to be remembered, and after some more bit of passing time, the Gutenberg Press came along and helped all sorts of propagandists offer their interpretations of the One True God during the Reformation. We will refrain from parsing the words and writings of the Protestants vs. the Catholics, which led to an unfathomable amount of bloodshed. I’ll just mention a minor footnote: In 1627, an entity called the College of Propaganda was founded by Pope Urban VIII. (At least he was upfront about it, just as FDR would later be when he mastered the art in a similarly named department in the days leading up to and through WWII.)

There are all the pamphlets and fliers written in England and France and the Americas and lots of other land masses citing the usual reasons they should be in charge, and then we’re up to McCarthy doing his thing destroying careers and lives and then Reagan explained why the way to be more prosperous was to change the direction that money flowed. (Up.)

Skipping ahead to the past 20 years, when words used to kill rocketed to maximum velocity with the dawn of the Internet and then the monetizing of its problem child, social media. And now, here we are, brushing up uncomfortably close to the shoulders and the rising anxieties of the people living in Germany almost exactly a century ago.

Poems can’t turn all this around. But they can keep us from going mad.

The first probably were oral (although there’s disagreement there), created as rhyming words to aid memorizing and relaying, from the Vedas (1500–1000 BCE) to the Odyssey (800–675 BCE), and, once written, were probably among the earliest records of most literate cultures—fragments on early monoliths, runestones, and stelae.

The first epic poem is generally thought to be “Epic of Gilgamesh,” written in modern-day Iran in the third millennium BCE—thousands of years before the propagandists dirtied their fingers. The first half describes Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and Enkidu, a “wild man created by the gods to stop Gilgamesh from oppressing the people of Uruk.”

Let’s move on to what might perhaps offer a distraction. Below, a handful of poems written during difficult times. I urge you to offer your favorites—of any nature or mood—in the discussion box below.

I Look at the World
—Langston Hughes

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

What Kind of Times Are These
—Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

Rosa Parks
—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.

London
—William Blake

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

Passive Voice
—Laura Da’

I use a trick to teach students
how to avoid passive voice.

Circle the verbs.
Imagine inserting “by zombies”
after each one.

Have the words been claimed
by the flesh-hungry undead?
If so, passive voice.

I wonder if these
sixth graders will recollect,
on summer vacation,
as they stretch their legs
on the way home
from Yellowstone or Yosemite
and the byway’s historical marker
beckons them to the
site of an Indian village—

Where trouble was brewing.
Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.
Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred.
Where most were women and children.

Riveted bramble of passive verbs
etched in wood—
stripped hands
breaking up from the dry ground
to pinch the meat
of their young red tongues.

Haiti
—Jennifer Rahim

For the earth has spoken,
to you, her magma Creole.

Full-throated syllables, up-
rising from deep down,

an honest elocution —
rudimentary sound: guttural

nouns, forthright, strong,
the rumbled conviction of verbs

unfettered by reticence
as the first poetry of creation.

A secret has passed between you
so wonderfully terrible,

it laid your cities prostrate,
raptured your citizenry.

Now, we look to your remnant
courtesy cable TV

and garble theories thinking
ourselves saved.

Only the wise among us pin
our ears to the ground,

listening in hope of catching
even a half syllable

of the language forming
like a new world on your tongue.

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Lagniappe: Here’s a fun fact: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s wedding ceremony in Gibraltar lasted a whopping10 minutes.

Image by Korosh.091—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0