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.
Copyright © L'Nass Shango | Year Posted 2009
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