Fuel To The Street Fires example essay topic

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID: A FIRE SERMON Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish-T.S. Eliot A Cinematic Poem The Communard's, they are storming heaven! A damp gust of March wind swirls and scatters papers. And the hot, critical July days! - tense wireless bristling with flashes, stammering, stuttering, awaiting what code, what code to translate Capital, Famine, Predatory War, into what dialectic odyssey the machine gun's riveting shall inscribe- the Leatherjacket fatally indite In the Smolny: the decisive delegates drawn faces, burnt cigarettes, telephones, wires, leaflets, - telegraphic congresses: and in the chill streets armed workers, soldiers, add fuel to the street fires. Rifles ready. Waiting. Deciding.

Who are the riders When the thunderheads hammer, the palaces reverberate, the napoleonic columns fall; the cracked plaster of paris Narcissus drowns in his fragments. The Thorthunder speaks: Workers! Soldiers! Sailors!

We are the riders of steel storms! We are the fire-bearers! Ours the heritage of the first flame-runner racing up the steep dark slopes, lightning in the night! Created and creator of fire! We are the riders of steel stallions- we are the fire-bearers, the kinetic synergy of factories snorting f lambent plumes, charging, rushing up the tracks beacon-eyed! And scarlet ships of space wing time's fires cataclysmic bear earth's heirs the communists with battle shouts rumble over the sky ways, scatter cannonades of stars, - flowers of life and death, flower of revolution rocket amid acrid clouds!

The Thorthunder says: (rumbling crumbling) Da! Da Da! All Power To The Soviets! The Spring rain blows over the steppes.

In October lightning ripples in the wind waved wheat- great streak of silver whistling scythe! And tractors bloom in the wheatfields! They rumble, they crumble the earth to their powerful wills. They speak: Gigant! Overhead- soft sunset winds blow rose gold odors twilight ly descend with their first young star. Over the bridge strong hands on wheels and levers skim.

Over the bridge trains bead red stars weld through fire and iron five years! - electric songs of speeding lights! A blow torch simmers sparkles and the Leatherjacket welds stars over the waters below. Red coals toss in torrents in waterfalls of the Dnieprostroi, and the Dnieper sows her banks with rubies. There spring up socialized cities... Workers of Magnitogorsk, with huge blast furnaces, write in flame, through fire and iron, steel statements of steel deeds: armored trains of revolution dynamic steel drilling through black rock dynamiting tunnels mining black gold ores!

Subways without christ beggars whose blind eyes beseech a penance! While the bursting sun flings from chaotic flame-pits the synthesis of new worlds... Far into the night, far into the ages, the burning worlds whirl and shine... City towns... worker palaces of art and culture...

Workers! We are at once the makers and the made! Across transition belts of time and space, tools in hand, we mould the human race, we lay the base, assemble and rivet bolts and parts of marxist machinery, and build mighty structures, higher forms of social union... classless society... Gigant! Here are the blazing windows of iron mountains in an electromagnetic sunset.

These are the heights men reach. Still higher- the Communard soars like a comet, until the world is small tinder for such a blaze of space! Yes the world is burning and the stormwind's big bellows fan the flames and the hammer pounds stronger and stronger and the anvil rings in answer Thalatta! Thalatta! and her all-conquering legions shout and clash and clang their armor and scarlet seas surge exultant upon new shores flowers of revolution red and gold bursting the magniloquent red battle horses of plunging plumes in the thundering wind paced with the lightning... roar... a song of flame and the world in the embrace of the flaming flood and the hammer heard clanging clanging upon an anvil clanging and shaping world october and they march and demonstrate and bright banners of faces cheer thorthunderclapplause! and they shout through the streets of the universe yes and the sun like an executed head falls and the whole sky bleeds dripping over church and skyscraper and arms like hammers strike stars forge new worlds shoot upwards yes!

Note: The longer version of the poem is from Funaroff's The Spider and the Clock (1938). The shorter version, illustrated by Herbert Kruckman, is from New Masses (1932).