Abolitionist Project

For my Civics class

“All men are created equal”,

That simple line was just a prequel,

To the horror called slavery,

What happened after 1808,

Abolishment of slavery decided to come late,

After all that has come,

The Middle Passage has been around for a while,

Every slave sailed on a boat for miles,

All were treated inhuman,

They were beaten and whipped,

After, sometimes, they were kidnapped,

And snatched away from their families,

After they were taken away,

On a wretched boat they have to lay,

That stinks and rots over the months,

Blood and mucus all over the floor,

Only on the ceiling lays a little “door”,

Some even say it resembles a slaughterhouse,

Little they may or may not know,

Their lives’ are about to go way down low,

For they are going to be a part of the Trade,

Known to us, the Triangle Trade,

To them, the day their beautiful lives start to fade,

Because this is the underworld on Earth,

When realizing they’re being taken from their homeland,

Some of them see the risks at hand,

And fight to stay where they belong,

They can punch, kick, and put up a fight as long as they want,

And we will just sit here and taunt,

But they will not be able to win the fights,

Overtime on the horrendous, dire boat,

There will be abominable situations afloat,

Like suicide, disease, illness and they can’t do anything about it,

No one hears your thoughts at night,

No one’s there when you are full of fright,

You’re split from your family who comfort you,

On the sea,

They’re feed slop served by you and me,

Then whipped if they don’t eat,

Now imagine you are one of them,

One of the thousands of the men or women,

Being one of the tortured,

You’re sleeping, cramped on rotting wood,

Nothing will be happy or again good,

You’ll want to die like the others do,

Death’ll seem more appealing than slavery,

On this boat without any bravery,

You’ll become another victim of suicide,

Eaten by sharks or drowned,

Everyone will just have the same old frown,

But they will now be crying knowing you’re dead,

This is giving us, America, an extremely negative impact,

Our country’s death toll has dramatically gone up, in fact,

African Americans are being hunted and caught like wild animals, too,

They are all just seen as property,

This is worse than when we had to dump all of that tea,

Just to get our own Declaration of Independence,

Speaking of which, one thing our Declaration lacks,

Is making a pact,

To actually treat everyone equally,

I don’t see a point of speaking those words,

When you are not going to respect them afterwards,

“All men are created equal”

Author's Note

I had to make this for my Civics class. We were abolitionists and we had to make propaganda for it; I made a poem, obviously. Hope you liked it. Leave suggestions and tips for my writing, please. Thanks!
-Willa

Reviews

[CecilA]

Nicely done, Willa

You have a nice poem here regarding one of the greatest atrocities of all time - human bondage.

I suggest a rewrite while you read it aloud. Consider writiing the whole poem in the past tense.

I took the liberty of doing this review after I noticed your review of Dell's work.

Thanks for sharing this promising poem.

Sincerely, Cecil

[Savior of Time]

For the project, we had to be a 19th century abolitionist, so it had to seem present tense. Thanks for the kind words.