Lets take a step back
and examine what we’ve got.
Columbus came in and
let the Indians rot.
Did he have the right to do so?
Heh, who cares about rights?
He had the dinero and power in this case,
and oh, he was also white.
So of course he’d be the one,
the one to win.
Ignore the fact that he was a sociopath
and that he felt no chagrin.
He was like “YAY. Go England”
“We’re just making them civilized”
But today, he is the reason that
today, their whole population has been paralyzed.
Did he not think
when he raped those young girls?
When he killed those innocent children,
in greed for that gold and for those pearls?
Those poor Tainos,
he came and basically them wiped out.
What a fate they were destined to?
No one paid attention to their screams and shouts.
Why, then, do we
celebrate this stigma of a man?
He was the one the one that took lives
and threw them in the trash can.
Did he feel remorse?
Nah! Why would he?
He had the support of King Ferdinand
and of Spain’s Queen Bee.
He was getting dem riches,
which were the only things that seemed to matter.
Not those Taino old folk he killed,
or those children whose lives he slaughtered.
So tell me why on Columbus day,
we do not mourn?
Mourn for all those Indian lives
that were killed and those yet to be born?
How do we, as humans,
find it justified to dwell
in a house that’s been made
on top of their yells?
Why do we never
never acknowledge the fact
that the blood of the Indians
is the reason our shelter is intact?
So does that not make us
just as bad as that sociopath
Cuz we basically sleep in beds
placed on dead people’s wrath?
Illustration Theodor de Bry, 1594http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Letter_on_the_First_Voyage
I like the way you incorporated a rather 21st century writing style to a a centuries old argument! Your argument seems harsh and powerful, however like it was said during the oil spill of BP, “You’re not mad enough to stop driving your car” or in this case “You’re not mad enough to move out of the country or give back the rights to the land to the natives”
Its great how you exploited the elephant in the room, even though now their and our history is told more on fact, many seem to not talk about how we live on a grave. Also, yea, I agree with Shazia and I really thought it was creative to write a poem from fact and history instead of writing a history lesson. So keep up the good work.