This is Bomani Armah, aka the Watermelon Man aka Baba Bomani. Happy National Poetry Month! Make sure to check out my songs about creative writing and get your “Writers Don’t Make Mistakes…” t-shirt! Click on the links below and also check out notarapper.com babagotbars.com
This is my 3/30 and it’s 16 bars on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.
SOFT LANGUAGE
“Slave owner” is to soft a use of language/
Doesn’t accurately describe the pain and the anguish/
The depravity and suffering in which we had to languish/
How slave owners made a banquet from our enslavement/
Your ancestor knocked on the door to get in this arrangement/
Mine woke up beaten, brainwashed and shackled in the basement/
They tell me to get over it, that those days are ancient/
But my pockets full of green photos of men who ain’t shit/
Held up as examples of morality and sincerity/
While practicing the worlds worst kinds of barbarity/
You can’t imagine the violence meted out with regularity/
All for the purpose of their own prosperity/
We never deal with the truth of their slave owning severity/
Why is the Declaration of Independence a parody?
Why must we respond to state sanctioned murder of black people with solidarity/
The founders were murderers, torturers and rapist of black people let’s say that for the clarity/
Bomani D. Armah 