POEM
the senses feel impending change: the clues
that guide our burdened hearts, heavy with pam,
awakening class-memories-
they burn again!
o
comrades of my dawns and days and nights
o
you who live with me
you at my side in battle
and at midnight talk
after the fruitful day
learning to meet the cha)]<.>nge of tomorrow's foe–
welcome this spring!
this burning first of May
this evtr-recurring day pregnant with history
born in this land which witnessed our birth–
this laud 'Will
be ollr own!
Remember now–
delve backward through the years' accumulated dust:
Haymarket-Spies, George Engel, Albert Parsons–
the noose drawn tightly-gasping "I have nothing,
nothing, not even now, tha t I regret ... "
Fisher
and
Lingg;
their shadows on a wall
magnified a millionfold, cast by a setting sun
westward to California, east to Hatteras
where embattled workers sought an added hour of day.
Mark their names well: their death
and now recall
the spring that came the next year and the years that followed
and the warS that bled us and the war that bore
shining through the mud and mangled limbs the dawn,
life
for the men of Russia
and for us
victory in sight, a star grown clear in the skies!
Mark their names well: now feel the memory
that coursed in action through your father's vems,
given to you at birth, to a million others:
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