Poets are all pipers or should be.

The piper is here
C.2003 M.Bennett Hooper

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You have become drunken on victimization.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You have become drunken on oppression.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You have abandoned your future
which is embodied in your children.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You must now pay the bill for your social indiscretion
Via mis-education, via incarceration, via self and soul
Mutilation, via physical violation as you
march towards the ovens of your latest holocaust
Which is an enemy of old first venereal disease and now
AIDS.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
Black men and women close their eyes in denial
as if ignorance and death will pass them by.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
To dance means you must hear the music,
The music of love which leaps from the pens and lips of poets
who are tired of weeping mothers, wives, elders, and children.
To dance means you must accept the mantle of responsibility
And stop begging Pharaoh to let your people go
Especially since we have become Pharaoh once more.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You follow too quickly that which is designed to destroy you.
So you dance to the tunes of self hatred via not knowing
who you really are but more than the lack of knowledge
Not caring.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You can’t believe the beauty that lies hidden beneath your own
Black self.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You are afraid of love, me and yourself whom
You fear to trust.
For the promise of the elders lies embedded in
The pursuit of excellence ,by you, for you, and because of you.
That is our latest and only freedom song and fight.
The piper is here and you must decide Black people
To dance or die.
Playtime is over, the children are watching.
Must they become you.
We elders are dying. We elders are dying..
The pipe grows heavy upon our lips.
The piper is here and it is your turn
and time to dance