May Day in New York City and around the world

Tom Morello and his “Guitarmy” perform his “World Wide Rebel Song” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” for the crowd at Union Square.

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a week since I last blogged and I have been longing to blog here, and tonight at last I have a topic so important and dear I hope all my friends and readers — our hope for change for the better for us all –, that I must blog. May Day. I did post twice on my Sylvia blog (That dog: he ran away; women without men ought to be ought there working from Day One; May Day) but in neither case did I have the material I really wanted: good talk, films, songs, dancing, conveying the immediate experience of what was going on in so many places as well as a history of May Day and all it has meant and could mean again since it was first promulgated in the 1880s in the US.

I came across that tonight: Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow.org podcast: she does first interviews Tariq Ali (British-Pakistani political commentator, writer, activist, and editor of the New Left Review. Author of numerous books, including The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad) and Amy Wright (retired US Army colonel and diplomat) on Obama’s midnight visit to Afghanistan: both are worth listening to. But what I am hoping you’ll stay for is what follows: over 40 minutes of broadcast of the Occupy movement joining with unions, all sorts of associations, people in the streets from colleges, to make their voices and reality known. I wanted to embed this video onto this site, but found when I went to UTube (where I have an account), it must be under 15 minutes. I can though provide a link and if you click you will have a bloody great picture, good sound and be inspirited as I was:

May Day in New York City and around the world

Two poems:

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

–Muriel Rukeyser

The Proletariat Speaks

I love beautiful things:
Great trees, bending green winged branches to a velvet lawn, Fountains sparkling
in white marble basins,
Cool fragrance of lilacs and roses and honeysuckle

Or exotic blooms, filling the air with heart-contracting odors; pacious rooms,
cool and gracious with statues and books,
Carven seats and tapestries, and old masters,
Whose patina shows the wealth of centuries.

And so I work
In a dusty office, whose grimed windows
Look out on an alley of unbelievable squalor,
Where mangy cats, in their degradation, spurn
warming bits of meat and bread;
Where odors, vile and breath-taking, rise in fetid waves
Filling my nostrils, scorching my humid, bitter cheeks.

I love beautiful things:
Carven tables laid with lily-hued linen
And fragile china and sparkling iridescent glass;
Pale silver, etched with heraldries,
Where tender bits of regal dainties tempt,
And soft-stepped service anticipates the unspoken wish.

And so I eat
In the food-laden air of a greasy kitchen,
At an oil-clothed table:
Plate piled high with food that turns my head away,
Lest a squeamish stomach reject too soon
The lumpy gobs it never needed.
Or in a smoky cafeteria, balancing a slippery tray
To a table crowded with elbows
Which lately the busboy wiped with a grimy rag.

I love beautiful things:
Soft linen sheets and silken coverlet,
Sweet cool of chamber opened wide to fragrant breeze;
Rose-shaded lamps and golden atomizers,
Spraying Parisian fragrance over my relaxed limbs,
Fresh from a white marble bath, and sweet cool spray.

And so I sleep
In a hot hall-room whose half-opened window,
Unscreened, refuses to budge another inch,
Admits no air, only insects, and hot choking gasps
That make me writhe, nun-like, in sackcloth sheets and lump:
of straw
And then I rise
To fight my way to a dubious tub,
Whose tiny, tepid stream threatens to make me late;
And hurrying out, dab my unrefreshed face
With bits of toiletry from the ten cent store

—-Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Ellen