Was it only for this
You endure trash and flies
Magi's bow and kiss
And parents laden arms
With dazzling gifts
In sparkling paper wraps
Hustling in the bustling
Drip and drizzle
O a season's festivities?
Was only for this
The African bowed
With his heavy charity of wood
He could not even own,
Being marginalized and propertyless
Property of your love
And I pulpit story
Again and again
Of redemption
In a manger sleeping?
From the scraps of economy
In the blistered wonder land
The tax and strain
Of tradition's requirement
Deepens the pain
Foreign to repentance here
Ignorant to the cosmic despair
The soul brinks on precipice
Of the unaware
Manger and cross
Are just another commodity
In the archeology of disbelief.
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.