Poetry is Power My Country by Samuel Alfred Beadle

hey guys you know this one around turn me around turn me around going to let nobody turn me around I'm going to keep all walkinging Samuel Alfred Beetle was born during slavery he struggled to study law at time when access to the study of Law and admission to the bar was controlled by people who had the power of and the desire for complete subjugation he was black man who overcame those barriers he was realist who maintained hope and imagined what could be through all of this he was Patriotic Man his poem my country was published in 1912 just few years after he was forced by the racism of the citizens of his state with the complicity of his state and federal governments to abandon his lucrative law practice practice and to leave his home or be killed in the preface to his book lyrics of the underworld in which the poem appears he wrote the peace my country is but fanciful flight of Hope from conditions that are to what ought to be the scope of one's environment in country whose underlying principles are said to be equal rights to all special benefits to none and since my country is creature of fancy may it not be palmed off on the uninitiated as verse if not poetry those of my fellows who would unraid me for indulging the fancy together with those who would eliminate me under the doctrine this is white man's country will not hope further deprive me from enjoying through the imagination what seems to be impossible as matter of fact if these truths are not self-evident but false that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness let me at least hold them among the things imaginable cannot abandon the position that this is my my country speaking in voice of the underworld world in which race of people lived not just on the margins but in reality that was in law and in fact separate and beneath the world of the majority Beetle explained that his country was not the one celebrated by the majority but one of his imagination One Promise in the nation's founding documents to all its citizens Maring down to Freedom my country by Samuel Alfred Beetle my country God bless thee God bless thee my home with Harvest and plenty thy dark fertile LOM the Brooklet that bickers from hills far above and dances and Di through veils that love go pearling on May it the sun on its Sheen the crest in the fern on its banks growing green the med ever verdant were Grays gentle kind and wide roam the herds of my neighbor and mine my country God bless thee God bless thee my home thou dearer and grander than all other Earth with clim sweet and Bal me Fair land of my birth May Valiant thy youth grow more stalwart more Brave till poor lagard nor coward nor slave seen in thy valleys nor met in thy Hills where babbles the brook and the bright Dew distills country of mine may thy humblest son be ever true to thy genius Brave happy and free my country God bless thee God bless thee my home May paid grow the hand that strikes not for thee when traitors would spoil thee thou land of the free and the alien who dares to invade thy domain By The Sword let him fall and from sleep with the slain let him never awake in the morning to greet the daisies that bloom or his dank winding sheet and freedom my country's great Boon to the world let me die on the day that thy Banners are furled love thee adore thee my country do thy faults though are many in pull pit in Pew the work of the vicious the mean and the vain who vile in their motive and weak in their brain forget that the law is the strength of the Brave and the man who would break it worse than slave but Thou Art my country still Grand and Sublime the noblest in genius the fairest in clim my country God bless thee God bless thee my home