Human Rights Poem (50): The Second Coming

The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is [...]

Human Rights Poem (49): The Slave’s Lament

The Slave’s Lament, Robert Burns
It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthrall
For the lands of Virginia-ginia O;
Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more,
And alas! I am weary, weary O!
Torn from &c.
All on that charming coast is no bitter snow and frost,
Like the lands of Virginia-ginia O;
There streams for [...]

Human Rights Poem (48): The White House

The White House, Claude McKay
Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your [...]

Human Rights Poem (47): Refugee

Time for one of my own:
Refugee (2), FIlip Spagnoli
I’m a stranger, like hope in a world that doesn’t change
or change in a world that doesn’t hope.
And like all strangers I wash my hands separately,
and I scratch my own back,
and I no longer wonder ’bout the double meaning of “asylum”
‘cos there is none:
you have to be [...]

Human Rights Poem (46): A Pict Song

A Pict Song, Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall,
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on–that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.
We are the Little Folk–we!
Too little [...]

Human Rights Poem (45): I Sit and Look Out

I Sit and Look Out, Walt Whitman
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by [...]

Human Rights Poem (44): The Elf King

The Elf king (Der Erlkönig), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Who rides so late through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.
He has the little one well in the arm
He holds him secure, he holds him warm.
“My son, why hide your face in fear?”
“See you not, Father, the Elf king?
The Elf king with crown and [...]

Human Rights Poem (43): Musee des beaux arts

(Photograph: Jane Bown)
Musee des beaux arts, W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not [...]

Human Rights Poem (42): The End and the Beginning

The End and the Beginning, Wislawa Szymborska
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a [...]

Human Rights Poem (41): The Solution

The Solution, Bertolt Brecht
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?