The Workers’ Muse, No. 1
Editor’s Note: The Workers’ Muse is a new column featuring poetry by Wobblies.
Who among us, witnessing the horrific events that are occurring in Gaza (the cold murder of children in particular), can remain oblivious to the desperate failings of yet another imperialist settler policy?
Who can feel anything but revulsion toward this criminal Zionist project—a project that puts a dazzling spotlight on the larger failings of a globalist fascist enterprise that, even as it is failing, seeks to harm working people throughout the world?
The following poem was written as an act of compassion and hope for the beleaguered people of Palestine.
The seeping corpses speak in vain;
The screaming Mothers are not heard… But what know we of stifled pain
who sanctify the spoken word?
Drop the bombs on the house of dolls; Silence the children in their sleep.
Strangle truth until it hurts…
Who’s to sow, and who’s to reap?
People on their shattered knees
nowhere left to breathe or roam…
Cheated eyes replete with pleas
saw no resurrection in the home…
And Purgatory’s gatekeepers cursed and
swore: HERE WE HAVE THE ENDLESS WAR! I
AM NOT ETERNITY!
GIVE ME RESPITE,
YOU SCABROUS GOD!
I AM NOT ETERNITY!
But only SILENCE answered.
Then it roared:
TIS “YOU” WHO’VE MADE THIS ENDLESS WAR!