How to pronounce "masses"

Maybe later you're going to be at a protest,

and someone's going to have a poster that says,

"They buried us, but they didn't know we were seeds."

That's poetry.

You might be in your U.S. History class,

and your teacher may play a video of

Martin Luther King Jr. saying: "We will be able to

hew out of this mountain  of despair a stone of hope."

That's poetry.

Or maybe even here, in New York City,

you're going to go visit the Statue of Liberty

where there's a sonnet that declares, as Americans,

"Give us your tired, your poor,

your huddled masses yearning to be free."

So you see, when someone asks me

to write a poem that's not political,

what they're really asking me is to

not ask charged and challenging questions

in my poetic work,

and that does not work,

because poetry is always at the pulse

of the most dangerous and the most daring

questions that a nation or a world might face.