Flashback: poems for the Liverpool dockers
Private Eyes
Two years is two years too long

also: Never Again

On May Day, tomorrow, sometime in the course of the day,
I’ll take your hand, sister, I’ll take your hand, brother, and
lift our arms all together in honor of the workers’ holiday,

and the Internationale we’ll be singing tomorrow will also
remember that today Shitler blew his brains out 63 years ago
like that criminal in the White House should at any moment,

and that today 33 years ago the great people of Vietnam won
an unforgettable victory for socialism over the same brutal
machine that beat Rodney King of Los Angeles 17 years ago

and set off actions in states like Washington, Nevada, Illinois
because the hunger for justice that’s coming, that’s already
manifesting for food in Haiti, Egypt, Nicaragua, Pakistan,

the hunger that’s joined to the will of that deathless invincible
Union of the spirit of revolution, that hunger which has already
given birth to fourteen years of Mayan resistance and which

defies the mass production of outright lies about how delicious
life tastes with individual choices and forgets about the children
dropping dead of starvation, even here in the other America–

O if ever there was a time to get off the left side of our asses and
go to the bottom of the pot, and see that it’s empty and the kids
needs food. O if ever there was need for Revolution, it’s now

Jack Hirschman