If you take away our literature, you take away our sight.
We become the blinded king of nowhere.
When we look out on the world beyond the valley of ashes,
we will conceal our eyes and
forget that you don’t need a pair of glass slippers to be Cinderella.
We will forget that we need need to be home by midnight,
because after midnight it’s so dark
that you might go out hunting and mistake a mockingbird for a crow,
or a crow for a raven.
When we try to use our words, words, words, they will cut out our tongues
and force us to play a game that leaves us more hungry than satisfied.
This is because instead of pure knowledge, we are being spoon fed a corrupted education,
and we will no longer eat alphabet soup without our big brother standing over our shoulder preaching to us about the glorious future that will be 1984,
and we will all be forced to live in that cowardly, old world.
And there they will lead us like lambs to the slaughter.
Where if they see the spark of curiosity
they will try to wash it out like the ****** spot they see it to be.
We will forget why the caged bird sings
and why the baby’s gravestone only said Beloved.
They will paint an A on our chest which will stand for absent,
as in absent from the conversation because
we are not able to comprehend what they are saying.
We will not find joy in the poetry written on baseball glove
because we will not know how to read it,
and we will never be the catcher
because we will all be separate and and still not live in peace.
When we come to a fork in the road
we will take the path that everyone else has traveled on,
because we have not learned to stand on our own two feet.
Which means that we will never be able to find Alaska or
where the fault is in our stars.
We will not hear the stories of what happened to the handmaid,
and they will tell us if we are brave, kind, honest, intelligent, or selfless,
because you can only be one.
Our whole lives we will never have pride, but we will accept their prejudice.
We will hear the heartbeat in the floor boards and blame it on the wind.
When we find ourselves stranded we will reach for the conch and fight over it,
because we will all be stuck between a rock and a hard place,
and when the sirens of our society call to us with lies about what our future will be,
we will jump from the boat and swim towards our deaths.
because life without books is just as good as no life at all.
We will lay dying in coffins that our children build for us
as unspoken poets with our heads in the oven.
We will be condemned to make the past our future
and we will watch as they test what they can burn at 451 degrees.
And finally when we all sit down and accept the bibliocaust they have stoked,
we will forget the things our dear friends
Ellie and Anne warned us about what can happen in an annex or in the night.
Slam poem about banned books and the power of reading in our education system. References to 29 various pieces of literature and 3 authors. I hope you enjoy!
