Far from poetry
You can’t eat
words
Trust me, I know
More that a few
people
Have tried to
make me eat mine
And I have
discovered
They are
indigestible
Poetry cannot
feed the poor
Words cannot make
concrete jungles
into paradise
Last time I
checked
The bum on the
corner
Wasn’t asking
Brother can you
spare a poem?
And no one has
ever
Even out of the
profoundest
Abject
desperation
Knocked over a
bodega
To
get money for a dictionary.
Teenage boys
Don’t pawn
momma’s jewelry
So they can get
one more
Whitman fix
Young girls don’t
Sell their bodies
on the street corner
So they can buy
Chapbooks to read
To
their fatherless babies.
You will not end
war
With a poem
I once tried
To
stop bullets with words.
It didn’t work.
You won’t patch
The
hole in the ozone with rhyme.
The rain forest
cannot be saved with a sonnet.
Couplets won’t
protect
The
white seal or the lynx.
A drowning man in
the ocean
Going down for
what he knows
Is the last time
Doesn’t reach out
With the last
ounce of mortal strength
For
Emerson or even Baraka.
Yet words have
power
Power to change
hearts
Power to grow
minds
Power to birth
imaginations
Words remind
people
They have souls
Words teach the
rich and the poor
The young the old
the good the bad
The white black
brown red yellow
That we all need
to be new
And in becoming
new
We can make a new
world
Before
it’s too late.