A favorite poem of mine from the great worker poet Robert Edwards -- also published in his book "The Big Job" by Red Dragonfly Press --
*Late Night at the Diner* I walk among you, yes -- with discredited hopes in the Time of the Financiers, my dialectical hat full of holes and the black rain down will rain. I eat among you, elbow to elbow, in the greasy spoons, shoulders hunched over our bowls, ask you to pass the salt, and you do, good stranger in the old coat, who might yet be my friend. As I mop up my soppins with yesterday’s bread, you tell me how bad things are and getting worse, because I look like a man who has slept in his shoes in a friendless city, a man who knows a thing or three about the pace of unemployment lines -- the kind of guy you could trust out of earshot of the Boss. But what can one person do, considering that a door is the size of a grave standing on a question? Should you argue with your empty hand and harvest fire? Build a voice, perhaps, more molehill than mountain? Learn to grow old poor, adopted by silence and eating the class names for failure? The waitress fills our cups again, knows we know she eavesdrops on our counter talk. Not one alone, climbing the walls, mumbling inside his number and his name, but many together, the whole hoi polloi of us. I could say that word, more curse than conjuration in these toxic times -- Revolution -- and watch you pull you eyes and elbows in across lines more black and white than any I could reach or write across. But some risks are worth taking, as this is worth having -- a unity I will believe in past mockery, and my sympathy will not be revised into pages where the sun is buried beneath myth. A dream hardens into speech, and beyond this residue of action there is us, talking over empty plates, callin’ ‘em as we see ‘em, my voice added to yours, your voice to mine, ours to the waitress’s, who takes the pencil from behind her ear and joins us on her break, until all the bus stop diners and holes-in-the-wall are ablaze with talk traveling at the sound of light, in little bars people are raising their hands and yelling out, “Hey! Set ‘em up, Joe! And pour one for yourself. We’ve got some talking to do down here!” Until the time for talk is done. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4762): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4762 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79182231/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
