Famous Working Class Poems by Famous Poets

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...years,
all these,
 to their very last page,
I present to you,
 the planet’s proletarian.

The enemy
 of the massed working class
is my enemy too
 inveterate and of long standing.

Years of trial
 and days of hunger
 ordered us
to march 
 under the red flag.

We opened
 each volume
 of Marx
as we would open
 the shutters
 in our own house;
but we did not have to read
 to make up our minds
which side to join,
 which side to fight on.

Our dialectics
 were not l...Read more of this...

...queen of my

Ten year old heart

Among the tansies

And the broken sills.





15



My trouble was I’m not

Really working class,

I never was, we never were,

It was an accident of war

My family landing there;

I’ve got no working class

Leeds uncles and aunts,

A family needs a family

To fall back on but

We had none, no aunts

In Hunslet streets

With daughters who’d

Take their knickers

Down for me with the

Excuse of having to wee. 

16



Morning disappeared...Read more of this...

...on
eating steak and onions.
And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children
and the cause of labor and the working class.
It was laughter of an unshakable man knowing life to be
a rich and red-blooded thing.
Yes, his laugh rang like the call of gray birds filled with
a glory of joy ramming their winged flight through
a rain storm.
His name was in many newspapers as an enemy of the
nation and few keepers of churches or schools would
open their doors to...Read more of this...

...s this rebellion
Till t'were routed by Henry at Stoke,
And Lambert were taken and made to confess 
That his parents was working class folk.

The public forgave this deception,
The thing that made them proper mad
Was a twopenny increase on every one's rates 
To pay for the fun they had had.

And so when Peter Warbeck came over
Expecting his praise to be sung,
He was greeted, defeated, escheated, unseated, 
Maltreated and finally hung.

And the Baron went back to hi...Read more of this...

...How I love the working-class girls of Leeds,

Their mile-wide smiles, eyes bright as beads,

Their young breasts bobbing as they run,

Hands quick as darting fish, lithe legs

Bare as they scramble over the Hollows

With brown-soled feet and dimpled bums

Half-covered with knickers, and short frocks

Full of flowers and their delicate ears,

Perfect teeth ...Read more of this...

...obe



SO **** CUTHBERT BRODERICK’S TOWN HALL

BRIDEWELL AND MAGISTRACY.



I want a history of the culture

Of the working class and not

Hoggart’s slimy gone-up-in-the-world

Jabber for the curious bourgeoisie

He was especially maladroit

On working-class sexuality

A voyeur picking humorous moments

To show the ignorance of the class

He sprang from. “Anything was an occasion” -

Or did he mean ‘excuse’? - “for intercourse,

Even a visit to the chip-shop”.



...Read more of this...

...--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
 --for my brother

Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like...Read more of this...

...I thought it made me look more 'working class'
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)

All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR) ,
his cap tu...Read more of this...

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