Verse

Can You Hear Them Marching?

Listen. Can't you hear them? It's the sound of marching feet. It's the armies of the workers. From every land they meet. They are marching on to Victory. They shall trample every foe, For their slogan's human brotherhood Everywhere they go. They shall up the bars from prisons. They will wreck each dungeon cell, They will liberate the victims Of the boss-created hell. They will level social barriers And by reason of their might Eradicate for ever The ruling parasite They will trample class distinction In the mud beneath their heels For tomorrow's ruling class shall come From factories, mines...

To the Memory of Leon Trotsky

Never, since history began, Was such a struggle waged by man, Nor so much won as in the span He fought. A tortured world of misery Writhed round him; scourged with calumy To liberate humanity He fought. Against innumerable odds, Deep disillusionment, the squads Of fascists, and the labor frauds. He fought. The rampant chauvinistic flood Stained not hi* banner with its mud; To keep it red as workers* blood He fought. His struggle stamps the finest page In labors glorious heritage; Foremost of Marx's lineage He fought. And we, through him who bathed in day Our eyes, and steeled our red array...

150 years of working on London Underground

Traverse these airless edges. London Underground, 5am to final lamp. A litany of tunnels punched out memory of light. Station upon station, footfall crumbled. Waterloo: Sainsbury’s. Dance wire, via headwall and auto-phone. Replicated ghosts. Fire extinguishers idle and fat with chemical entropy. Sidling at platform precipice, Heart at fingers Trains smooth and wreathed in souls. Swiss Cottage: Spar, Iceland & Sainsbury’s. Detritus: lives pared like gossamer bark. Someone says: ‘They brought her legs back in a separate bag.’ Brake dust, myriad lines. Faith fallen in suicide pit. Curves drenched...

150 YEARS OF WORKING THE LONDON UNDERGROUND

150 YEARS OF WORKING THE LONDON UNDERGROUND. No. 150: WHERE WE GOT OUR GRUB. PAST & PRESENT. By "Blujah", a Tube worker and poet. Reproduced from the original post here . The Tubeworker bulletin will be organising events and activities in 2013 commemorating 150 years of workers' struggle on London Underground. Traverse these airless edges. London Underground, 5am to final lamp. A litany of tunnels punched out memory of light. Station upon station, footfall crumbled. Waterloo: Sainsbury’s. Dance wire, via headwall and auto-phone. Replicated ghosts. Fire extinguishers idle and fat with chemical...

Nobody Knew She Was There

Ewan MacColl is best known as a working-class balladeer, and the architect of Britain’s “folk song revival” of the 1950s and 60s. His political and artistic legacy is complex and contradictory – he wrote and sung stirringly on many working-class struggles, but he was also a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist and a cultural conservative with a narrow and dogmatic view of what represented “real” and “authentic” art. This song, about his mother, is not one of his most famous but is exemplary of the moving human sensitivity of some of the best of his work. It is politically poignant, a poetic broadside...

My City is a Hard Femme

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Toronto-based writer and activist. Much of both her writing and activist work focuses on the struggles of LGBTQ people, particularly queer and trans people of colour. This piece explores both gender and sexual identities, and their intersection with identities of place (particularly, in this case, urban space). The poem itself is “hard”, with the alliterations (“guts of the girl gang”) landing like little punches. It’s a poem of collision and contrast, of “broken things” which are still “lovely”, in spite of (or because of?) their “brokenness”. Human...

The Ghost of Roger Casement

Roger Casement was a former British diplomat and anti-slavery campaigner who became an Irish revolutionary nationalist. He was arrested in April 1916, three days before the Easter Rising was due to begin, and tried and hanged for treason. William Butler Yeats, perhaps Ireland’s most famous ever poet and certainly the best-known poetic chronicler of the 1916 movement, wrote this piece to demand that his remains were returned to Ireland. Yeats’ politics – about Irish national liberation, and pretty much everything else – were shifting, and often confused. But this poem finds him at perhaps his...

Fragile

Global, impersonal, uncaring, ruthless and divisive but... Fragile Global. A machine that will not sway in its quest, our daily lives to control. Capitalist society has become a monolithic empire, in control of all of our thoughts. A construct of enormous proportions, computed, controlled by ones and by noughts. Impersonal. A machine that will not sway in its quest, our daily lives to control. Capitalism, an alienated system of profit, of greed and of war, has but one single desire. For profiteering and accumulation, the only things able to stoke the insatiable fire. Uncaring. A machine that...

Moments in Working-Class Life

Martyn Hudson reviews Geek Tragedy by David Rudd Mitchell London: Flavourbus Press 2012 Tragedy, for David Rudd Mitchell in this first collection of poems, lies in that moment when the eponymous Geek steps over from childhood into being something older, specifically at the moment of his father’s death. The poems in this collection bear witness to a sense of humanness confronted by the blank indifference of nature and history to our hopes and frustrations and document the stoical lives of working class people in moments of transit or seeing. Ultimately the resolute humanism of Mitchell finds...

The Treason of the the Intellectuals

“I have, I suppose, a sneaky hope for a few of these pieces, but in general I make no claim that this is poetry. That belongs to an altogether higher order of things. This is workaday political verse — politics understood in its broader social sense, to include the politics of such things as religion and emigration from Ireland. It is the sort of verse that was once very common in socialist and other publications and is now rare. “Political verse nowadays tends to be dismissed as a contradiction in terms. Of course, it was not always so. Politics, the overall running of society, shapes and...

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