From Diana Cook:
This month’s Harpers magazine featured a discussion of Langston Hughes’s poem, “Johannesburg Mines,” in Actuary of the Apocalypse, by Anne Boyer:
The contradiction of a world that holds both poetry and exploited labor is exposed. The poem’s question is the poem’s own answer, which is that things must not continue like this, and yet they do.
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/anne-boyer-the-anti-extinction-engine-johannesburg-mines-langston-hughes/Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the suffering of mine workers in Johannesburg:
In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000 natives working.What kind of poem
Would you make out of that?240,000 natives working
In the Johannesburg mines.Here is my poem:
In our current vaccination program
There are 3544 deaths and 118902 adverse reactionsWhat kind of poem
Would you make out of that?118902 adverse reactions and 3544 deaths
In our current vaccination program