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This
poem is meant to express the anguish and anger that today's young black
descendants find themselves in; unable to fully comprehend how one race could
enslave another and full of hurt about a past they cannot correct. There
is a strong need for the black family of man to put behind this granite ball he
cannot carry, or else he will find he himself a slave to a past he cannot
change.
I am a
Black Man
First
human seed of the earth,
Yet my
beginning is portrayed as white
You have
robbed me of my birth.
I
descended from a civilization
That was
the first advancement of man,
Yet you
once reduced me to slavery
From
which I had to start all over again.
From my
first day of enslavement,
Until my
freedom day,
You survived by the
sweat of my brow
And made
my daughter your time for play.
But now I
am a free man
And I
stand beside your descendants.
And
though I'm full of rage and anger
I know
that they were not in it.
My choice
is to move ahead,
For I was
freed from cabin row.
But as I
look around, I see only the name has changed
Its now
called ...The Ghetto.
INDOCTRINATION TO SLAVERY was deep
And it's
lesson learned to be a trait,
For even
in supposed freedom,
Some of
my brothers .. still bow and scrape!
Some of
us have been highly educated
And have
struggled through personal strife,
Yet still
we find on the way, obstacles,
With die
hard remnants of passed lives.
We are a
spectrum of colors
Evidence
of the old master's play,
But we
are a strong determined people
Evidence
of our ancestral ways.
Someday,
perhaps, with the passage of time,
The past
will nor color the presence of here,
And all
man can forgo their self imposed differences
Then the
future will be clear.
Until
then, it's a shame
That the
children of God must bare,
The
stigma and fruits of racial ignorance
The legacy of
yesterday's errors!
©Thegentlemanpoet
In this ode, I tried
to put myself in the white world with its black dilemma. What I found is
revealed in this poem.
I found a race of
people today who feel they are expected to pay a debt which they had no control
over, and at the same time realizing that no matter what they do, the debt could
never be paid - a sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't: a catch 22
situation. Subsequently, they find themselves as much a slave to their
ancestor's wrong doing, as the slave that their ancestors owned.
I am a
white man
And I'm
trying to understand,
Why you
hold me responsible
For my
ancestor's plan.
Three
hundred years ago
When they made slaves of other men,
Three
hundred years ago
When they
looted the Afri...can.
I was
neither born, nor thought of
When this
all began anew,
And now
you tell me and the world
That we
all owe a debt to you.
I cannot
and will not, condone
My
forefather's evil strain,
But no
matter how much I try,
The
stigma on me you hang.
Like you,
I want all people
To live
together,
But it
seems you won't let the past die
And you
use me as its tether.
Give me a
cause or a reason,
Or
something, that I can affect,
Because I
can't change yesterday
No matter
how hard I regret.
You
preach that we are the same
Both,
children of God.
You
expect him to understand you,
While you
give none..How odd!
You say
you hate bigotry,
And
deplore the use of slavery,
And yet
you seek to enslave me,
To my
forefather's ancestry.
For what
my forefathers have done
They
alone, must answer to the Lord,
But for
what you have done
May cause
you...to answer even more.
For it is
written in God's law
(Vengeance is mine) saith the Lord
And the
Lord shall not forgive
When
forgiveness you ignore!
©Thegentlemanpoet
Martin Luther's "I Have a
Dream" Speech
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