Unsilenced
06/01/20
Unsilenced
the sun is setting on Minneapolis
as elsewhere we await the call
police precincts are up in flames
but their pillars still stand tall
as a house of cards
built on the broken promise of Liberty & Justice For All Except Us
so intrinsically broken that you ain’t allowed to protest it
the pigs given badges and free reign by a government run by criminals are panicking with powerful weaponry in their clutches, corrupt cronies in their pockets as ever before
all bought and paid for
by this system concerned solely with capital while
innocent people starve in the streets
and the struggle rages on
in Chicago and Charleston and Cincinnati and Compton in
Selma and Baltimore and Baton Rouge and Los Angeles in
Ferguson and Flint and Paden City and The Bronx
alike
our
powerful politicians value property and profits over the lives of the impoverished, and on the tv they tell us targeted violence and strategic destruction are no longer effective in America —
forget Blair Mountain, forget Yorktown —
only in Baghdad and Mosul and Raqqa and Aleppo and Kabul and Kandahar and Hanoi and Hai Phong and the West Bank and Elsewhere, anywhere but here
at Home
where Good Men take arms to die like dogs and to rape and to murder like savages for the rackets of capitalist parasites
where poor folk are slaughtered by the system like sacrificial lambs for the crime of Finally Fighting Back
if these All-American streets could speak for folks like you & me, they’d tell soul-crushing stories of
pure hopes and noble dreams emerging and vanishing instantaneously upward into that suffocating cancerous smoke of systematic oppression, illuminated with the saturated red-orange rage which Revolutions are made of
we are
more than unwilling martyrs for
half-hearted appeasement of
the masses being murdered we are
passion we are
the underclass
the proletariat
the People
the beaten and broken and damned
of all shades of life
realizing — grasping — igniting
the invaluable freedom of strength in numbers
we are
The Land of The Free built on the backs of the slaves and
still here we stand
unified
still now we fight with fortitude
this system, the power,
our oppressor together
perpetually screaming in the language of shared struggle, in eternal Solidarity —
unsilenced by the scabs,
by the bastards,
by it all
douglas j harding
