Monday's Poetry: "Kids Who Die"

 

by Pa Rock

Poetry Appreciator

American poet Langston Hughes penned this powerful poem, "Kids Who Die," in 1938 as a lamentation and as a way to bring attention to the cruelty, suffering, and deadly chaos that was arising out of the racial and class struggles of that time.   Today, more than eighty years later, race is still an open wound in our country, one that will not heal, and one which some people even refuse to acknowledge as a prevalent social ailment.

With this work Langston Hughes drew the curtain back on young people dying as a result of racially-inspired hatred and class struggles, but I cannot help feeling that if he were alive and writing today, the poet would add a few stanzas about the young people in our country who are being gunned down for simply going to school.   We have yet to hear the sweet song of life triumphant.

Kids Who Die

by Langston Hughes

This is for the kids who die,

Black and white,

For kids will die certainly.

The old and rich will live on awhile,

As always,

Eating blood and gold,

Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi

Organizing sharecroppers

Kids will die in the streets of Chicago

Organizing workers

Kids will die in the orange groves of California

Telling others to get together

Whites and Filipinos,

Negroes and Mexicans,

All kinds will die

Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment

And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned

Who pen editorials in the papers,

And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names

White and black,

Who make surveys and write books

Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,

And the sleazy courts,

And the bribe-reaching police,

And the blood-loving generals,

And the money-loving preachers

Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,

Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets

To frighten the people - 

For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people -

And the old and rich don't want the people

To taste the iron of the kids who die,

Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,

To believe an Angelo Herndon*, or even get together

Listen, kids who die - 

Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you

Except in our hearts

Maybe your bodies'll be lost in a swamp

Or a prison grave, or the potter's field,

Or the rivers where you're drowned like Leibknecht**

But the day will come - 

You are sure yourselves that it is coming - 

When the marching feet of the masses

Will raise for you a living monument of love,

And joy, and laughter,

And black hands and white hands clasped as one,

And a song that reaches the sky - 

The song of the life triumphant

Through the kids who die.

* Angelo Herndon was a black US labor organizer who was arrested and convicted of insurrection in 1932 for attempting to organize industrial workers.

**Karl Liebknecht was a German socialist/communist who was assassinated in 1919.