Poetry: "New Birth, When We Have Won"

NEW BIRTH, WHEN WE HAVE WON

(after Lewis Allen’s ‘Beloved Comrade’)

For Fidel and the Fallen Among Us

The fight

The fight has

The fight has just begun

Just begun

Just begun

The fight for change, for justice,

The fight against fascism has just begun---

Anew.

To you, to you, to you beloved comrades who sang the people’s song, fought and fell in the people’s war

The people’s war. Jarama is here.

Jarama is now. Jarama was always.    

The List. The 10. Phone-taps and

Black-bag jobs, and spying eyes,

The Blacklist, revived.

Unions reviled.

Jarama is now.

Where you stood, we now stand,

Underground, rise-up planned.

Where you bled the pains of all,

Where you’re remembered, we recall.

The fight goes on.

Fidel said: a revolution is a struggle to the death----between the future and the past.

Our present tense, our present, our present-now. 

The past goes on….

Code Noir, minstrel show

Sambo, old Jim Crow,

All come out for the lynching show!

The fight, still. The fight. Still.

Ghetto slum-lords and imports of the CIA.

Timeless today.

Broken mirrors splinter, tearing

Humiliation and

Segregation, the

Evisceration and deportation.

The Dreamers awoken, the Dreamers awoken! But it’s the same dream, the same Dream.

Night raids and night

Terrors and

Nightscapes for those who look different and

Pray different and

Speak different. From us.

Them.

The cold of side-glances of glancing blows,

Powdered frost over those forgotten, those apart, those

Forgotten. The old. The ill.

The OTHER.

The fight was then, the fight

Renewed. The fight

Renewed.

Would-be Brownshirts’ detention camps

Official, devised. Surmised. White pride. White national. White supremacy. White Hate.

The Alpha. The Decider. The Breadwinner. Mr. Mister. The Man.

Male supremacy. Male

Domination. The little woman, the bitch, ball-and-chain, the fairer sex, T and A.

Madonna/whore/Madonna/whore…

They’ll let you do anything when you’re a celebrity.

RESERVATIONS: Lock-up for our Nations

Native lands’ desecration.

Winter water cannons snarl and bite, claiming the land and

Tradition.

Detention.

Camps for the Japanese citizen,

J. Edgar HUAC in secret drag

Deporting Reds, the scare is back.

CO-INTEL, Liberte ,

Hollywood 10, Chicago 7, Central Park 5

Free Bobby Seale and Angela Davis.

Still, the Prison Industrial Complex            

Marches on. Marches on.

The fight will still go on.

Drug sweep and profile,

Muslim ban, No Irish Need Apply.

Joe Hill, Kevin Barry, Tom Mooney,

Scottsboro, Sacco, Vanzetti.

The Wobs, the Party.

Emma Goldman. And Paul Robeson.

Trumbo. The Rosenbergs. Herndon. Peltier. Mumia, Amiri. Panthers, Lords, Weathermen. NOW, Guerilla Girls and Rad Womyn and Teamsters and Turtles Stopping the gears.

Silencing the silencing.

Now, here comes the Highway Patrol

Beating farmers up from the Dustbowl.

Pinkerton thugs kill workers with

Fire and gun and stone.

When we all were hungry. And freezing and

Alone. 

But we still blame the poor for their lack of Home.

Money-changers, then and now, stealing Lives, owning families, breaking pride

And Elections.

Reagan Youth bottle-fed on Wall Street,

Noshing on livelihoods

Now stand in tall buildings with gold letters and

Shiny silver buttons,

Feeding on promise.

Today’s refugee from war and poverty fights

For hope,

She needs to believe. Needs to believe.

But the Swastika, back in style,

Hate crimes all the rage.

Confederate flag bewitches, beguiles,

The cold grows colder by the day.

Divide, disrupt,

Repeal, corrupt.

And the fight must still go on.

The fight must still go on.

New birth, new birth

When we have won, when we have won. 

When we have won...

Broken mirror splinters 10,000 shards of 

Constitution and Declaration over

Un-American perseveration.

…Goddamn the corporation.

  --John Pietaro, Brooklyn NY December 9, 2016

The Red Microphone performing "New Birth, When We Have Won", Better World Awards 2016