Fists on Fire: Poetry from the Heart of the Revolution

THE ETHER ARCANE

by Jack Hirschman

Back to Part 1

2.

"What time is it? You mean right now?"

Everywhere police force grows
against our plans to change the future,
and everywhere the charge is put
to the heart.

Listen: let this be a way we can happen,
we who are the dark food of the still unborn
coming seminally to light.

Put your hands between tomorrow’s thighs.
The head is visible, she is not in pain,
Though (against them!) she’s pushing, pushing
the body of the star out.

Help with your hands, its rays are visible.
We’re going to make a world together,
all of us and you and me.

A loving slap on the ass for a birth well
Done

The stress of
the grain of bark of the tree of life
reveals the rhythm of eternity,
just as a little lunacy
is greater than wisdom,
just as these glasses of wine raised
to celebrate the birth
bring us to reaffirmation.

Comrade,
this is the new Communist Party,
this medium,
this little thing:


It’s the way we’re suiting up for the funeral
of everything rotten in the world,
the way the future’s going to talk to us
without interference,
the way a haiku written by the wind on the big toe
of Lao-tse as he sleeps will appear on a placard
against the global thugs in Genoa.

Comrade, we’ve been so long at each other’s breaths.
Quick, rassle me down with your radiance.
I’m not dead. That too is possible here.

From a distant star
onto the page of an ancient codex,
a beam of light can be bent
into a brother.

We’re being driven to Genoa singing
old partisan songs and new compositions
of resistance. As we have in Goteberg.
Prague. Seattle.

The cops are everywhere, have been globalized,
but so have rebellions in Stoke, in Bradford,
in Burnley, in Chiapas and Los Angeles.
The New Class is everywhere too,
sick of poverty, racism, cop killings
in The Bronx, Brixton, San Francisco,
it’s kicking ass.
No food, no salary for weeks, no nothing
but Nothing itself. Listen, comrade,
to make this thing work,
we need to hear and see ever more deeply,
ever more patiently listen and look up:
Every cell will have one before we’re finished,
and every cell will be hardcore
liberation-bent,
like a light-force
against the ruling force
with its skull and baton-bones
blocking every cranny of our lives.

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