Throughout history, poetry has always spoken in the most challenging, tragic, and formative circumstances. Poets have been at the forefront of wielding language to create change for the people. Explore the work of Elizabeth Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Marilyn Chin, Aracelis Girmay, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Roger Reeves, Adrienne Rich, and Muriel Rukeyser, to name just a few.
Listen to Audre Lorde read “A Song for Many Movements.”
Find protest poetry, including poems about equality, social justice, human rights, Black Lives Matter, and climate change:
Poems of Protest, Rebellion, & Hope
“Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally” by Elizabeth Alexander
I dreamed a pronouncement / about poetry and peace...
“Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history...
“Unlawful Assembly” by Kimberly Blaeser
Don't hurry to safety...
“The Pedestrian” by Tommye Blount
When the pickup truck, with its side mirror...
“litany” by Mahogany L. Browne
today i am a black woman in america...
“No, Kanye, it’s not LIKE we’re mentally in prison” by Erica Dawson
We don't have heirlooms. Haven't owned things long enough. We're hoarding us...
“Mantahhan is a Lenape Word” by Natalie Diaz
It is December and we must be brave...
“How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way” by Martín Espada
I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell...
“A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay
Is that Eric Garner worked...
“You are Who I Love” by Aracelis Girmay
You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart...
“What Do We Do—Now” by Ellen Hagan
We mourn, we bless,...
“Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind” by Brenda Hillman
—kept losing self control...
“I, Too” by Langston Hughes
I, too, sing America.
“Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes
Let it be the dream it used to be...
“When I Rise Up” by Georgia Douglas Johnson
When I rise up above the earth...
“Defiant” by Patricia Spears Jones
Fruit from one vine tangles with another...
“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” by June Jordan
1. I will no longer lightly walk behind...
“Firing Squad” by Ilya Kaminsky
On balconies, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight on our lips...
“Breathe. As in. (shadow)” by Rosamond S. King
Breathe / . As in what if...
“A New National Anthem” by Ada Limón
The truth is, I've never cared for the Natonal...
“Now That We Have Tasted Hope” by Khaled Mattawa
Now that we have come out of hiding,...
“America” by Claude McKay
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,...
“declaration” by Andrés Montoya
i have found / the face / of story / lying again...
“Red Brocade” by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Arabs used to say,...
“from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]” by Claudia Rankine
On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available...
“A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Ríos
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—...
“little prayer” by Danez Smith
let ruin end here...
“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children...
“Unrest in Baton Rouge” by Tracy K. Smith
Our bodies run with ink dark blood...
from “denoument” by Anne Waldman
Resistance. Had to resist. Ward off. Deflect...
“Amos (Postscript, 1968)” by Margaret Walker
From Montgomery to Memphis he marches...
“The Women’s Litany” by Margaret Widdemer
Let us in through the guarded gate,...
“Protest” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
To sin by silence, when we should protest,...
“Make Me Human or Give Me Death” by May Yang
This matters because i’ve lived on that side of life that you all have made for...
“juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet” by Danez Smith
one is hard & the other tried to be...
Read about Political Poetry in our glossary of poetic terms.
Shelter in Poems
Politics and Social Justice: Poems for Teens
Lines of poetry for posters, banners, or placards.
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What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open
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we are the ones we have been waiting for
—June Jordan, from “Poem for South African Women”
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All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
—W. H. Auden, from “September 1, 1939”
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Hold fast to dreams.
—Langston Hughes, from “Dreams”
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I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Dirge Without Music”
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And naught may daunt her,—she hath strength for all.
—Emma Lazarus, from “Work”
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The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox , from “Protest”
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Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?
—Matthew Olzmann, from “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz”
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"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action."
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"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
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What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open
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“I love America more than any other country in this world. And, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Essays and Anthologies on Protest and Political Poetry
“The impulse to enter, with other humans, through
language, into the order and disorder of the world, is
poetic at its root as surely as it is political at its root.”—Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003)
“Standing five foot eight, eyes eager and observational, mouth set, with brown skin, I’ve frequently heard from people who meet me, ‘I was so intimidated by you!’ I think: I am only Black and alive and breathing. I only have this woman body, this gift of language and many of my physical abilities. I don’t scowl or suck my teeth without reason, so why am I a threat? This is when I realize, like Audre Lorde, that opening my woman mouth has little to do with being threatening. Simply being is the threat.”
from “Dismantling Rage: On Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider” by Mahogany L. Browne
“Here was a poetry that seemed to contextualize American xenophobia and white supremacy within a larger, global framework of celebrity culture, genocide, violence, sex, and corruption, and, thus, implicitly asserted racial oppression as symptomatic of something that was tainted at our human core.”
from “Assuming the Mask: Persona and Identity in Ai’s Poetry” by Major Jackson
“It was essentially illegal to write or perform poetry in our native languages until the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. The act was passed 278 years after Eleazer’s poem was published and was an edict ‘to protect and preserve the traditional religious rights and cultural practices of American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Native Hawaiians.’”
from “Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets,” a Blaney Lecture by Joy Harjo
“The crowd seemed to react to the poem in a way I had not expected, with enthusiasm and interest, and it was only later that I was told that they heard this poem about a Salvadoran colonel as a poem about their former dictator, Colonel Qaddafi. They translated the sense of the poem not only into Arabic from English but also into their time and place.”
from “Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness,” a Blaney Lecture by Carolyn Forché
“The genocide of America’s native peoples took place under democratic rule, as well as massacres in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Iraq. Each of the world’s great democracies has a history of barbarism, genocide, massacre, and torture in its recent archives, and—more frighteningly—the capacity and the rationalizing rhetoric that would allow this history to be repeated. Clearly, the forces of love and aggregation that Whitman speaks of need to expand further and wider within our country and around the world.”
from “Poetry & Democracy: Khaled Mattawa on Whitman's Democratic Vistas” by Khaled Mattawa
Browse more texts on poetry of politics and protest.
Read about Political Poetry in our glossary of poetic terms.