The Voice Of Injustice Is Silence

I’ve been asked by a number of people where I got the tagline for this blog.
It came from a poem I wrote a few years back- and I honestly don’t think I stole it. Many things go through a writer’s brain between thought and writing- at least this writer- and I am never really satisfied when I read on of my published poems. I guess that’s why I keep writing them….

Still

It is time to open your mouth
And shape the sounds that give form
To the deathless moans of pain and suffering.
Because the voice of injustice is silence.

It is the industrial silence of the corporate owners
of the soul of America.
The owner of the rape victim
Has turned out to be the rapist,
who nurtures its growing fetus
with anger and guns,
With temples and sugar and crack.

It happens because it is
Purchased with favors
And scratched backs
And pretended piety.
The silence of fear,
Of the voiceless ones
Who see no Jesus in their
Cornflakes- only the one meal of
Their lonely, silent day.

“Keep them down and quiet,”
the fools say,
Because their money blinds them to
Moral bankruptcy and stupidity
And their power-drunk ears
Are closed to their own heartbeats.

But the voices will wake,
Sleepy maybe, at first,
But rested and ready.
They and the very stones will
scream, shouting from
The driveways of the country clubs
And the walls of the churches and schools
And Capitols, “Enough!”

It will be.
And the peace will not be a quiet peace.
It will be real and full of the sounds of
Life.
Unpurchased and awake.