May Day Salute

It is May again, milners, mariners, militants Ye laborers in union chafing come And breathe beyond the cankerers fields Crawl, fruit despised sucklings, from your dusty Lung corroding mines Walked the muscled roads your sweat Have softened for freedom You propertyless citizens come Rise from the hovel of slums And internal colonies You spirit of immigrants blown apart Building a railraod To a country without a heart Rise up like buildings bright sun And burn sin and stubble of dream In red red coming of the evening Slanted on the back of the horizon It's May the month of martyrs and flowers Burried under the morning tears Swing the factories wide Women wincing by the mired machines Of industrial capitalism floundering Like flag in the torrid heat of day Workers of the world My mother scrubbing floors to die In penury before the ragged memory Of a son's invisibility This is the month of May and meeting In the raging street Fruit pickers, cane cutters, hole diggers Cotton jiggers Dockmen, shovelmen, sailors, wrigglers Who were born empty handed by design Bring your mass to supply No more depression of our wage But the rising fire of our rage.