Powerful, in the emotive sense. Weak, in the poetic. And that is, I'm afraid, because of the terrible grammar and spelling. So, I fixed it up a bit. It should look something like this.
We died in the ships to America,
as we called to our lost mother earth.
We were sold to the land of another,
and made to dig through their earth.
Have you asked your self the price of sugar?
Washed white with the blood of slaves.
Dark skin, dark hair, dark name,
dark continent, pouring blood from its veins.
Have you asked your self, my brother, about the christian faith?
While our women were raped and torched, you still managed to say grace.
While you taught us to be christian, to be civil and free,
you did not treat us all equally and we were never free. [the rhyming here falters]
And so you took away our identity
to be nothing but a slave.
We lost our heritage, our culture and eventually our name,
to the land we belonged and to that we were claimed.
But money is a powerful thing,
and greed inhabited your souls once more.
And to our home lands you went,
to claim, claim, and claim [again, rhyming falters]
So you sat down to divide our beautiful continent,
like a simple English meat pie,
you created Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, the Congo
And not once did you give us the chance to ask why.
Your empires grew up to be bountiful and rich
but I'll ask you to remember that the rubber, coco and oil
were collected by a man who had no choice, but to
collect, collect, collect.
Now I'm not trying to be judgmental,
I'm not blaming it on you.
But for 200 years we had to fight for our rights,
from slavery to oppression to apartheid - it's a shame,
that after 200 years you can't turn around and say,
I'm sorry I'll take the blame.
**
Apart from the inconsistent rhyming, I very much liked this piece. It was good, and for me, strong. Poetically, I can't say. Someone more in the know about such things will inform you I dont doubt. This was good.
