Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
   “My cause is greater than yours!
     You only work for a Special Class,
     We work for the gain of the General Mass,
   Which every good ensures!”

Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
   “You underrate my Cause!
   While women remain a Subject Class,
   You never can move the General Mass,
   With your Economic Laws!”

Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
   “You misinterpret facts!
     There is no room for doubt or schism
     In Economic Determinism–
   It governs all our acts!”

Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
   “You men will always find
     That this old world will never move
     More swiftly in its ancient groove
   While women stay behind!”

“A lifted world lifts women up,”
   The Socialist explained.
     “You cannot lift the world at all
     While half of it is kept so small,”
   The Suffragist maintained.

The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
   “Your work is all the same:
     Work together or work apart,
     Work, each of you, with all your heart–
   Just get into the game!”

This poem is in the public domain.

You crawled back into your motel in a border town near the demarcation line between the nation-state of the living and the underworld. Sleepless, you peered out the window. You could see the neon lights garlanding the Gates of Horn and Ivory. The lights spelled out “OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY” in blinking red cursive. You laughed. Of course, death is the only border crossing still open to all. You watched the illumination from the street pour onto the wall above your bed: a red lasso that looped on the wall, as if the wall had begun to bleed extravagantly. Below, traffic packed the road in both directions. From the two open gates, dreams sailed into the living world from over the deserts. Some dreams true, some false. You recognized some of these dreams (Race, Nation, Gender) and could not tell from which gate they had emerged. Sleepless, you saw the line of pilgrims queued up to enter the underworld. The line seems longer lately, new refugees to the afterlife.

Copyright © 2019 by Ken Chen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 31, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea.
                 Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.
Finding earth-plains fair plains, save greenly grassed,
They strewed white feathers of cowardice, as they passed;
                 The golden stars with lances fine
                 The hills all red and darkened pine,
They blanched with their wand of power;
And turned the blood in a ruby rose
To a poor white poppy-flower.

They pyred a race of black, black men, 
And burned them to ashes white; then
Laughing, a young one claimed a skull.
For the skull of a black is white, not dull, 
                 But a glistening awful thing;
                 Made it seems, for this ghoul to swing
In the face of God with all his might,
And swear by the hell that siréd him:
                 “Man-maker, make white!”

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. 

The fields are white,
    The laborers are few;
Yet say the idle,
    There’s nothing to do.

Jails are crowded,
    In Sunday Schools few;
We still complain
    There’s nothing to do.

Drunkards are dying,
    Your sons, it is true;
Mothers’ arms folded,
    With nothing to do.

Heathens are dying,
    Their blood falls on you;
How can you people
    Find nothing to do?

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 31, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.