Hi @kaixin

However, I don't know what HAM MONTGOMERY means. A capital city name of south US？Could you please tell me about it？

HAM MONTGOMERY is simply the character's slave name. In the first decades of slavery, when Africans were brought to the Americas (and also some to the UK) they weren't allowed their own African names, but were given western type names (as I called them their slave names). After generations had passed as children were born from parents of slaves, and they were then considered the property of the slave owners (often plantation owners), the parents usually weren't even allowed to name their own children, or if their masters were less strict they might let them name them if it was they considered a 'good Christian name', like Luke, John etc.

So in my poem the slave's name is Ham Montgomery (Ham is a shortened version of the name Hamond) and he has had his eyes cut and burned to be made an example of what will happen for learning how to read and write, or teaching other slaves to read and write. This is why I created the cover image so that his name was on the wall in blood.

In the mid to late 1800's one of the chief concerns of the wealthy plantation owners was that the slaves they kept might become educated to the point where they could escape and find work in the north of the USA where slavery had been abolished. It is a vast area of study, but basically everything the slave owners did from the early days of slavery to the later days was meant to destroy their African culture, names, language, and also just to keep them from any type of education that might allow them to organise in any way. But the human spirit is stronger than even the most evil acts of subjugation, and slaves made their own music (chanting as they worked which you can hear in the YouTube video I shared in that poem) which later was part of the influence for blues music, and many of them took the Christian faith to heart strongly as solace for the terrible lives that were forced upon them. I could talk about many other aspects of the history of slavery, but this comment is getting away from me and I’ve got to eat breakfast

Oh, I guess maybe you've never heard of "the Great Firewall" in China either, which should be one of the reasons why you would probably not easily discover the ancient Chinese poems.

One of my friend's married a Chinese woman, and lived in china for 12 years until they decided to move back to the UK with their two sons, so I do have a small knowledge of the great firewall, and the state control that the Chinese government impose on their citizens. I remember that my friend Jay would email me occasionally, and I would say "why don't you chat to me on Facebook?" And he would say "I can't access those sites." My friend was never very good with computers or technical stuff so he didn't want to mess around with VPN's even though I offered to teach him how to use one lol

From my perspective I just wish that many of the people in charge (in my country as well) weren't so sociopathic and power mad. It would make for a much more pleasant, safe and open world. I often wonder if we wouldn't be better off with a compassionate AI leading the countries of the world 😂 Humans really don’t seem to be doing a good job of it as they destroy the environment and murder each other in pointless wars.

Anyway, keep sharing Chinese poems on hive and I will get to see them that way 🙂 By the way. Do you know about the communities feature on hive? I think that if you shared your poetry posts in Blockchain Poets community many people would be interested to read them!