Demonstration, Joe Jones 1935
This is the fifth year
I have marched across America;
get outa town and
keep movin
the factories are rust-scabbed and silent,
prairies are dry and desolate,
stopped the sheriff sale
no evictions here
farmers solid
breadlines eat like ever-lengthening worms
into the guts of the cities.
My brain is slow
and slowly I am learning
that this is wrong
and I must set it right.
Don't expect much longer
that I will be held back
by words and laws that are not mine.
I know now
that more than words are barriers
cops, machine guns, clubs,
courts, armies, tortures,
and priests and tear gas, lynchings ...
This is the fifth year
I have looked in America's face:
how goes it
brother
shifting, silent men in breadlines?
yes we've demonstrated
stopped evictions
we gotta do more
factory workers stretched and wracked with
conveyor belts and speed-up.
Many are they, strong and angry.
Storm
is damned behind the clouds
that are their eyes;
sullen as thunderheads,
banked against the night.
It can't be held back much longer.
Your flimsy words and futile weapons
will be crushed, turned back against
you
by the tempest of steel sickles,
by red thundering hammers of millions up-
raised.
- Harlen Crippen, 1934
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