2026 National Poetry Month, Day 28 Protest-Poetry

NPM 2026, Day 28 Protest-Poetry

Some of the most powerful poems are from voices raised against injustices,, speaking Truth to Power, sounding the alarm when we might need to be awakened, calling for solidarity with the voices crying in the wilderness. Righteous anger is never out of bounds for poetry, even if when it is so dangerous it has to be coded.

Poetry foundation has a list of poems of protest https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/101581/poems-of-protest-resistance-...

Lit Hub has collected some ICE poetry: https://lithub.com/letter-from-minnesota-a-brief-history-of-ice-in-poems/

Feel free to create and share an original poem. Or tell an anecdote. Find a connection with an existing poem you know and share that. Or post a link to music, film, essay, book.

For God's Sake Don't Visit the Zoo!

Someone opened the tiger cages.

First, the tigers ate the game keepers,
as they scrambled like mad to put
the man-eaters back in their cages, but
they would not go.

Then, tigers ate ones who tried to hide,
while visitors pointed and laughed
at ridding the zoo of brown heads,
and black ones too.

Then, tigers chased the tiger-loving ones,
who didn't run, not even alarmed,
believed a red hat would save them
from the carnage.

Then, tigers picked off the grannies who made
sweet apple pies, and the granddads
who fought in all our wars, knocked 'em
off their walkers.

Then, the well-fed tigers were really having fun,
left the zoo to consume all manner of humanity,
dollars flew out of their pockets but
that did no good.

Then, the alligators escaped.

--Debi Cates
April 28, 2026

This is bizarre and so origiinal! Quite a departure from haiku. And a wonderful image narrative. Although, all manner of cats terrrify me

I love the movement of then and then and then. An artistic adult version of I know an old woman who swallowed a fly....

The poem that follows is not a poem of protest; more my commentary against zoos in general. I wrote this when I was in Alabama a few years ago.

Birmingham Zoo

Giraffes in a driveway
Wildcats in a fish tank
Bears from the Dakotas
In the cotton-deep South

Ancient dusty elephants
Mangy old lioness
Sad rotten teeth
In Dixie’s mouth

October 23, 2022

>3 hamlet61: I think that is a protest poem, Matt, just by observing the terrible conditions is protesting it, or at the least objecting to it. It's odd how fondly I think of the zoos of my childhood. (I lived a few blocks from one, and associate the sounds of lions roaring with New Mexico!) Now that I am older, zoos seem crummier, and I come away with no good experience or understanding, just an overly hot afternoon of gawking and feeling sorry for the animals. Your poem nails that artificial and cruel experience.

I wonder how many poems you have written in total, after writing regularly for so many decades. Did you say that you are gathering them all together now?

Yes. I am gathering and digitizing. I have written a few thousand and am still going. I grew up going to the Bronx Zoo. Now the New York Wildlife Park. A cage is still a cage.

Wrote another protest poem, one way to excise a boiling boil. Also tried out a constraint type poem, the abecedarian.

ABC Primer of the Trumpstein Files
(for the young)

All see, all know they were
best buddies, blackmailer and blackmailed
cavalier cutthroat criminal cousins in a
decades-long dance, drumming business
exotic explosions of email, building a
factory of the famous, making filth of a
grieving gang of raped girls, gathered for
horn dogs in high places, high flyers off to an
isolated island of ick, entitled rich
jutting johnson jollies,
keenly knowing that killing
language of leering, of lying, laughing,
moans in mushroom-shaped
nasty nethers in the
orgasmic secret order of the
putrefied predators of pink
quivering, crying, quiet under
real threats of retribution
suffered the stench of sex sweat of the
traffickers, those thousand
unjust, undead
vampires of vitality.

We wait, are waiting,
expectantly expect, even pray
you both, you all rot in absolute
zero, cold ashes not forgiven by Giuffre, floating angel above Zorro's dead.

--Debi Cates
April 28,2026

>6 DebiCates: "expectantly expect" !

Clever.

>1 DebiCates: This reminded me of an edited collection of political poems, the title and editor escape me but it impressed me enough to include several examples in an Intro to Political Science course I was teaching at the time. I'll have to search it out again, I liked that it was broad in its understanding of what "politics" was, and the poems were a mix of classic and (to me) new or modern, and from a diverse group of authors.

>7 elenchus: If you find that title, E, I would love to know it. It is one of the things I think poetry does very well, as a cry in the wilderness, a siren, to and for us all. When things are bad, the poetry is still good, or maybe even better than still good.

My favorite in my protest was "jutting johnson jollies." I half expected (expectantly) some comment on that. I learned only very recently the slang johnson and what it meant.

I was also pleased with the last line. Take that, slimeballs, Z for Zorro! I would love if my home state New Mexico were to be the one to get justice for the girls and women, for the country, since the heads of the federal government are either in the core cabal or in the cowardly coverup.

Ah, I tracked it down: Carolyn Forché's Against Forgetting.

PITY THE NATION”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (After Khalil Gibran) 2007

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

>9 elenchus: Great. I just added it to my TBR. Really, I wish I could re-set to age 20 so I'd have time to read everything I want to read, which has gotten longer as I've gotten older, not shorter. Besides, it would be nice if my knees didn't hurt.

>10 nrmay: Twenty years later and my god, it's WORSE. Thank you for sharing that. It doesn't make me feel better at all, but it does put things in a larger perspective. I love Ferlinghetti's voice and his choices he made to use it.

>10 nrmay: here's another Ferlinghetti protest poem. It's a long one but an "easy" read.

I Am Waiting
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

>10 nrmay: I see you are a retired children's librarian. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I can't tell you how often I think of libraries in my childhood. I don't remember exact librarians any more, but I remember the books I read and marvel at some of the librarians that must have selected those to be in their stacks.

I also think of all those library books that my kids checked out from the school library and our public library and how many hours of my life I spent rounding them up when the due date approached. ha. I wouldn't change that for anything either.

>14 DebiCates: I echo this.

Both Ferlinghetti are great reads.

There's a great collection of protest poetry from the George W. Bush era called Poets Against the War edited by Sam Hamill.