Best Neighborhoods Poems
Restoring American
Neighborhoods
Motherhood, Fatherhood, Parenthood,
Brotherhood and Sisterhood are the keys
To the doors of a unified peace and goodwill
The hood being the covering of one mind
In an agreement, that empowers every step
We take as a nation moving as one collective unit
Refusing to allow terror to rule our lives
Enforcing, you touch one you touch us all
American soil grew to greatness from unity
Righteousness, Mercy and Grace taking pride
In our homeland and the value of life
We need to rise from the ashes building a human
Chain by one hand to another unbreakable
Through honoring the life in one another
Not Race, creeds or gender wealthy or poor simply
Because blood may be thicker than water
But
Love is
Thicker
Then
Blood
As a child everyone watched over the other
If your house burned down everyone came to
Help build a new one and feed and clothed those in crisis
I am not one but a part of each of you and you matter
To me using any gift or talent you possess to reach others
Our
Actions prove
What dwells
In our hearts
Help tear down
The social walls
Of indifference
By seeing equality
Moreover, value
In the coverings
Of the HOOD
Carole Cookie Arnold
The Universe of Neighborhoods
David J Walker
At this point
All thoughts of the future are laughable
As we gather and laugh a lot as affable
Senior citizens everyone
The glory days are long gone
but relived
Wednesday afternoons
at the tavern
where the beer is cold and the
old men bold
retelling
The old jokes as if they were new
(In low voices of course, times have changed you know)
To the many who are gone
we raise our mugs
In remembrance
And drink to them
whom we loved
To those girls and boys from the same
Universe neighborhood noise
of a low rent
Inner city society all its own
Where we atone for our sins but
Still grin as we toast our beers
and remember them
I had to pass these words on to you. The following sentence as a radical, joyful practice that extends in three directions, to others, To our opponents, and to our selves. If we can be enjoined, To when we see a stranger, Or someone different than us, we can think and say, you are a part of me, that I do not yet know. This simple sentence if applied in practice, can transform a relationship, a community, a culture, even the nation.
Suburban resident pretense, a bleak uniformity.
I grew up among the repetitious homes,
isolated alienated, I wandered the conformity,
the endless square yards, the dull feckless syndrome.
Repugnant yet intriguing, a redundant singularity,
fabrications of fortified, fraudulent self-deception,
blocks and blocks of suffocating, vapid vanity,
I endured the bland boredom like an endless inquisition.
All history, all memory was recklessly strip-mined away.
Barren of lore, fat men rode loud, smelly power mowers
belching oil over manicured lawns with access to the highways.
Insular castles in the air, the tributes to white flight silently cowered.
Everyone tried to grin with toothpaste commercial smiles.
Everyone tried flaunting success with Chevrolet Bel Air fins
and backyard swimming pools, barbeque pits, or patio tiles.
Success was a charade hiding deep, wounded chagrins.
This was the sterile zeitgeist of a secretive colonization,
where everyone was living in Thoreau’s quiet desperation,
where in desolation and despair, every heart lay resigned,
where perverse platitudes and euphemisms numbed the mind.
This microcosm where all communal convictions were taken,
where the broken edges of confident affiliation never awakened,
where commodified adorations formed the language of thrill,
where a busyness cluttered every weary mind like a noisy drill.
I grew up among the monotony; I was devoured by the beast,
this juncture of moment and place, its pain has never ceased.
The Great American Make-Believe, for Bobby and Sue.
These property lines were the racial entitlement of a few.
Some recast this age as Great America, craving a narcotic,
but ennobling these glib, obdurate neighborhoods is ironic.
The Great American Make-Believe, for Richard and Nicole,
concealed the dejected anguish, searching for a soul.
Neighborhoods ravaged by some youth of today,
too lazy to work, and a drop out of school,
but what can one say.
Mothers can't control them, and no daddy around,
they just prowl the neighborhoods in their
small towns.
What they don't understand, is most people
work hard, and they are at risk, of someone
whipping them down.
I know of one place, I have seen it myself,
the police say they are watching them, and
they are about to send them, straight to a cell.
I guess they had rather work, picking up trash
on the side of a road, with no freedom at all,
wow, what a goal.