Workers’ Day by Susie Davidson
When sweat and toil have laid new ground,
For millions of castles of mortar and brick,
With basic requirements provided by all,
And nobody needlessly hungry or sick,
Then we’ll know it’s Workers’ Day.
When the fruits of endeavor are harvested fully,
As storehouses bloat with provisions galore,
And profits and shares are just means of ensuring,
That all have the same, no less and no more,
Then we’ll know it’s Workers’ Day.
When communal gatherings are welcoming venues
For voices on every side of the fence,
And no one’s afraid to state an opinion,
In this new world order of the highest sense,
When laborers’ monuments stand in the squares,
As societies are rebuilt with inhabitants in mind,
Arsenals are stocked with food for the people,
Respect is bestowed upon all of mankind,
When unions and strikes are a thing of the past,
and there’s no need to picket or get in a line,
with health, education, and welfare in order
There really aren’t any demands to define,
When people have time to smell lilacs and roses,
Because there’s no anger, no issues, no race,
When within a cooperative built upon honor,
Envy and greed just haven’t a place,
When organization replaces dissent,
And it’s only ourselves that we need to obey,
When with our needs met we can be who we are,
And Utopia’s only a hair’s-breadth away...
Then we’ll know it’s Workers’ Day.
‘The Very Hungry Bank’ by Don McLagan
In the light of the moon, thirteen
six-sided floors sprout from a pedestal trunk
and overhang the tents at Dewey Square.
One sunny morning when the concrete and glass
sapling was first built, a green sign appeared - Pop -
announcing a tiny and very hungry BayBank.
In 1996, BankBoston acquired BayBank
but the bank was still hungry.
In 1999, FleetBank acquired BankBoston
but the bank was still hungry.
In 2004, Bank of America (itself acquired
by NationsBank) acquired FleetBank
but the bank was still hungry.
In the next years, the bank acquired one MBNA,
one Banco Itau, one US Trust, one LaSalle
Bank, one Countrywide Financial and one
Merrill Lynch.
That year the bank had a stomach ache. Now
it wasn’t a tiny little bank any more. It was a big
fat bank. It built a forty-five billion dollar safety net
called a TARP around itself, and stayed inside for a number
of months. Then it nibbled a hole in the TARP, and pushed
its way out. Alas, it was not a beautiful butterfly.
‘The Poet Arrives at the Former Site of the John Brown Trailer Park’ by Jacob Strautmann
I crossed the river at Harpers Ferry
southwest for your ribs Allegheny.
I’m a son of your hills, your flooding mines.
There’s news. Watch the sky unburdened;
your towns are empty. Saturday
rapture-like everyone moved on,
left even Charleston silent and gray,
Legislators scraping down
the Kanawha on sandpapery skin.
Your camps and unincorporateds
clenched their eyes, descended in
the blue tattoo of oxycontin.
Land-of-my-Mothers-but-not-of-my-Children,
of Appalachian Redevelopment Commissions,
when God once made a pact with you
and cut this mountain through and through
to share your Heat and Shale, you betrayed
and broke us. Now birds die here, and hay
in every hayfield molders; sheep
birth limp two-headed things and some
that speak like men if they speak at all.
Children of a disputed well
threw sandstone at their parents’ names
and left. They married and were gone.
Land of Byrd, of Hope and Church --
you left us before we left you.
When the Valley shut down, I was a child;
my dad stood in line to watch you pass.
We grew up in a tin can shaking in the wind,
stayed as long as we could; bargained
the hill like the soul leaves her body
for a city full of people and work.
You could have noticed, could have called
us back, could have called Richmond,
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore,
but we cut those hollow metal bonds
vibrating on hillsides or on a flat acre
of not much value, not much music.
Let’s Keep the Riot in PATRIOT by Peter Desmond
How can you be sleepy
when there’s no doubt the bedroom is bugged
and the black helicopters will land
at any moment in the street
and we’ll behold the ninja-clad national secret police,
who don’t need a warrant to search the house
and who take a grim delight in bagging heads
and electrocuting genitals, batter down the door
and seize our books, papers, and computers,
all because you downloaded that stupid recipe
for Christmas Pudding Ice Cream Bombe?
New World Disorder by Peter Desmond
After the national news
we watch crowd scenes
in the streets of far-off cities.
People throw stones
at phalanxes of uniformed men
in helmets and gas masks
whose left arms hold transparent shields,
four feet high, rectangular,
curved like the one
that did not save Achilles.
Today’s riots come to us
from Ankara and Jakarta.
The shields are emblazoned “Polis,”
the word for “city” in ancient Greece.
The polis’s right arms raise truncheons,
silently crack protesters’ heads
as the newscaster reports
on “IMF-ordered cutbacks.”
The crowds flee. It’s almost time
for an ad from a global corporation.
“Next up: sports and weather.
Yankees massacre Indians. Karl says
it’s only going to get hotter.”