Title: 7 Powerful Poems About Injustice & Racial Discrimination | Hive Life
Headings: 7 Powerful Poems About Injustice & Racial Discrimination
7 Powerful Poems About Injustice & Racial Discrimination
You’re Not Black – Amy Saunders
I, Too (1926) – Langston Hughes
Immigrant Blues – Li-Young Lee
Home – Warsan Shire
Caged Bird (1983) – Maya Angelou
After Zuko (2019) – Dave Harris
Rosa (1998) – Rita Dove
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Content: But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used? And me, confused about the flesh and the soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you? You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time. Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart. If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment. It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening
called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”
called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,”
called “I want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.” Born in 1957 to Chinese political exiles, Li-Young Lee lived in Indonesia in a time when anti-Chinese sentiment spread throughout the country. As a result, his own father was held as a political prisoner, and after a year of being held captive, Lee and his family fled to the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee’s poem, Immigrant Blues, is about the feelings of displacement and a lack of belonging that many immigrants struggle with, as a result of feeling disconnected from the rich culture they were born into, before being ripped away because of politics and systemic racism.