Protest poems and songs

 Here’s the opening stanza of a protest poem by Kim Stafford: 

1. Seeing a child weeping alone, would you:

a. bow close to ask what’s wrong …

b. shout for the parents …

c. call ICE.

 

It’s from “The Fauci-Trump Scale of Human Character.” It made me furious and it made me laugh.

One section of Stafford’s latest book is a collection of poems about current events. The poems protest the violence, racism, greed, ugliness and stupidity that pervades public life.

It seems to me that protest poetry is a symptom of the underlying health of the democracy. If people were lying down and taking it, you might worry that the patient was terminal. But people are not lying down and taking it.

I mentioned that theory to our son, who plays and writes music. He queued up a concert of protest songs. It was a long concert, but I remember Carti Blanton’s “Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch,” Jesse Welles’s “War Isn’t Murder” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”   

Rage is an odd thing. If you bottle it up, it will exhaust you. If you share it, it gives you energy, adds fuel to the fire.

• Sources and notes: Kim Stafford, As the Sky Begins to Change; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2024, p. 49.