INTO THE STREETS MAY FIRST!

Into the streets May First!
Into the roaring Square!
Shake the midtown towers!
Shatter the downtown air!
Come with a storm of banners,
Come with an earthquake tread,
Bells, hurl out of your belfries,
Red flag, leap out your red!
Out of the shops and factories,
Up with the sickle and hammer,
Comrades, these are our tools,
A song and a banner!
Roll song, from the sea of our hearts,
Banner, leap and be free;
Song and banner together,
Down with the bourgeoisie!
Sweep the big city, march forward,
The day is a barricade;
We hurl the bright bomb of the sun,
The moon like a hand grenade.
Pour forth like a second flood!
Thunder the alps of the air!
Subways are roaring our milllons —
Comrades, into the square!

ALFRED HAYES
First Published: New Masses, May, 1934

THE WORKERS’ MAYPOLE

World Workers, whatever may bind ye,
    This day let your work be undone:
Cast the clouds of the winter behind ye,
    And come forth and be glad in the sun.

Now again while the green earth rejoices
     In the bud and the blossom of May
Lift your hearts up again, and your voices,
     And keep merry the World’s Labour Day.

Let the winds lift your banners from far lands
    With a message of strife and of hope:
Raise the Maypole aloft with its garlands
    That gathers your cause in its scope.

It is writ on each ribbon that flies
     That flutters from fair Freedom’s heart:
If still far be the crown and the prize
     In its winning may each take a part.

Your cause is the hope of the world,
     In your strife is the life of the race,
The workers’ flag Freedom unfurled
     Is the veil of the bright future’s face.

Be ye many or few drawn together,
     Let your message be clear on this day;
Be ye birds of the spring, of one feather
     In this--that ye sing on May-Day.

Of the new life that still lieth hidden,
     Though its shadow is cast before;
The new birth of hope that unbidden
     Surely comes, as the sea to the shore.

Stand fast, then, Oh Workers, your ground,
     Together pull, strong and united:
Link your hands like a chain the world round,
     If you will that your hopes be requited.

When the World’s Workers, sisters and brothers,
     Shall build, in the new coming years,
A lair house of life--not for others,
     For the earth and its fulness is theirs.

WALTER CRANE
Written: April 13 1894 for The Workers Maypole cartoon, and published: Justice, 1894

’UNSKILLED’ — THE MAY DAY QUEEN
        
She is not ‘unskilled’, she is full of humanity;
she deals with it daily — the blood and shit of life
in all its dark glory.

She is particularly good
at holding the hand of your mum
who doesn’t know you anymore,
who cries in the night
for a hug from her daddy
long cold in the ground.

She has a degree in There There,
performed in sing song
at four in the morning
while changing wet sheets,
making it better.

Her cloak of invisibility, an unwanted superpower,
renders her open to attack from gladhanding climbers
on their way upwards to nowhere special,
greasing the pole behind them.

She has diplomas in kindness,
patience and back breaking work,
to the background noise
of the sneers and smears of some jerk
who wouldn’t have the wherewithal
to do her job.

She is as skilled as magicians.
Her body the foundry
of a nation suddenly grateful,
her heart its steel press;
if she falls, we all fall.

She is the May Day Queen,
powered by thanks for a job well done.
But the pacified pulse of a world gone haywire
cannot beat on thanks alone.

She is he. Is husband, midwife,
cleaner, nurse, care giver, osteopath;
and she stands as mighty as a forest
as she carries the rest of us on her back.

HARRY GALLACHER
Written in rage just after lockdown, when care workers — only weeks previously applauded and lauded as NHS key workers for working throughout the pandemic — were denied a pay rise as Priti Patel labelled them “unskilled.”

THE SHIPFITTER’S WIFE

I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I would go to him where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles,
his calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I’d open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me — the ship’s
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull’s silver ribs, spark of lead
kissing metal, the clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle
and the long drive home.

DORIANNE LAUX
Dorianne Laux’s 7th collection “Life On Earth” was released in January. Having previously worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid she is now a professor, lecturing at North Carolina State University and Pacific University. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review.

LENIN DANCES

When Lenin learned that the Bolshevik revolution
had held out for seventy-two days,
one more than the Paris Commune,
he came out of the Kremlin and danced in the snow.
No doubt, he didn’t imagine,
with the enemy at the gates
and there where he danced while blowing into his hands
that the Union would hold out for seventy-two years
by iron, blood and roses
in the trenches of Stalingrad, on the Asian steppes
orbiting the earth or in a Siberian dam
where twenty-year-old girls would go to build the future
and wagons would roll, in the middle of April
on frozen rivers ….
He didn’t know either that one day the ice would give
under the weight of men
or perhaps that people would get fed up, for a while,
of carrying their dreams at arm’s length
and that early one morning
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
would disappear.
But that day he had good reason
to dance in the snow.

FRANCIS COMBES
(translated by Alan Dent)
Francis Combes, a member of the French Communist Party since 1970, was an elected councillor in Val-d’Oise, National Secretary of Union of Communist Students, translator into French of poems by Mayakovsky, Heine, Brecht and Attila Jozsef, interviewer of Henri Lefebvre. Alan Dent is founder of The Penniless Press.

CITY WHISPERS

They touch the soles of my shoes
as I walk their fan-laid cobbles;
at home shoulders brush mine
along the walls they constructed.
They flick at the wheels
of the train on the rails they welded,
and the tyres of the traffic
on their rolled tarmac.
Nameless invisible builders.

Never in fashion, least of all now.
City quants market the dream of the concept
of the idea of money,
the nation states, torn
by piranhas, bleed into the water.
Their gift was in making: to
drive a nail in, absolutely straight,
with a pair of accurate blows,
lay bricks on plumb; skim plaster flat.

I hear the murmur of their voices,
a practical conversation
of few but useful words,
sidelit by swearing.
Getting the job done
and letting that speak for them.
Only once, years back
on a London May Day march
brickies from the local
building sites began a chant
question and response, echoing
against the office blocks:
“Who built this city?”
“We built this city!”

Walking home in winter I see the
soaring silhouette
of a slow-moving crane.
Can you hear them?
Without fuss, unnoticed,
building the city again.

RUTH AYLETT
Poetry submissions to [email protected]