social divisions poems

Basket Weave | Langley Shazor - A Poetry Website Featuring Poems by Contemporary Poets

Basket Weave | Langley Shazor

Intercultural divisions
Create indivisible boundaries
Invisible expanses
Inner city ravines
“Don’t go to that side of town.”
Because having “sense” and not
Being determined by one’s use of proper grammar
Or lack thereof
Substrata of self-inflicted segregation
This mangled microcosm
Apocryphal declarations of caste
Relentlessly decaying
Esteem and identification inhibited
Eight hundred years before two hundred year slaves
The framework was being laid
No coattails
Drawstrings of sack cloths ridden
Led by their own
Followed by others
Decolonization to recolonization
Reappropriation to misappropriation to disappropriation
A mile in shoes
A mile on bare feet
The direction remains

Circus | Tara Lynn Hawk - A Poetry Website Featuring Poems by Contemporary Poets

Circus | Tara Lynn Hawk

Silently stepping out
Into this world each morning
In sleep-rumpled clothes and with
An expression intended to
Ward off all takers
A tiresome daily ritual
Unwanted but necessary

There exists a rather
Infinite sorrow that hangs
About outside
Like a toxic cloud in search
Of its own forever home
Enveloping crash values
I reject

We proceed to show ourselves
But only for a minute or two
Before retreating back
Into the tiny bricked up
Private havens we created
With bare hands now
Wrinkled from the sun
And distress

Mourning the loss of
Our naked heart companions
Forests of well-aged trees
Cherished books and
The spontaneity of a pure life
Lived through art
We await for our turn
To join our friends

More at https://www.taralynnhawk.com.

Cast | Roy Pullam - A Poetry Website Featuring Poems by Contemporary Poets

Cast | Roy Pullam

We are always
In boxes
Sex, age, color, economic status
All having invisible walls
That define where we start
Often where we finish
We struggle against
Those barriers
But society
Reinforces their sturdiness
Rebar in the concrete
Making the obstacles
More rigid
So formidable
That often we accept
The impossibility of escape
Finding whatever comfort
In the situation
We feel
We cannot change

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