Red Banner Over Ybor City Shall example essay topic

Additional Poems By Joseph Freeman Essay, Research Additional Poems By Joseph Freeman TO THE OLD WORLD If your forefathers have been wise and brave, And lit a thousand lights, it little matters: You are an aged king before his grave Whom his own folly has reduced to tatters. While the world tumbles down about your head, Your royal cloak, inherited of old, Slips from your shoulders by a broken thread, And gathers dust into its woven gold. There let it lie, entangled in itself. Write the last footnote to your history, And, laying the volume on Time's iron shelf, Sit back to muse on days that are to be, When laughing boys, turning to sober men, Shall build your ruins into a world again (1921) PRINCE JERNIKIDZE Prince Jernikidze wears his boots Above his knees; his black mustache Curls like the Kaiser's; when he shoots Friend and foe turn white as ash. The movements of his hands are smelt, Ivory bullets grace his chest, The studded poignard at his belt Dangles down his thigh. The best Dancers in Tiflis envy his Light Lesginka's steady whirl, He bends his close-cropped head to kiss The finger-tips of every girl.

Over the shashleek and the wine His deep and passionate baritone Directs the singing down the line, And none may drain his glass alone. When morning breaks into his room He dons his long Circassian coat, Marches to the Sovnarkom Knocks at the door and clears his throat, Opens the ledger with his hand, Bows to the commissars who pass, Calls the janitor comrade, and Keeps accounts for the working class (1926) BALLAD OF TAMPA When after dinner you smoke, gentlemen, remember Tampa leads the world making clear Havanas: Mexicans, Cubans, Uruguayans, Porto Ricans are your vassals; Ybor City, Palmetto Beach, West Tampa sweat, ache, starve, For the azure smoke-ring exciting tonight's new lay. Dull-eyed sallow elderly women stand confuted In the factory-tomb banding, wrapping, boxing. Machines monotonously clock the minutes; Gossamer of cellophane automatically embraces cigars.

No, says the woman-worker, I don't count cigars packing; There's no time, no time; we get used to it; One look tells us how many there are; No time... no time... no time. Bastard houses, colonial and Spanish, lean Over Ybor City's narrow Seventh Avenue, memorial Of antithetic races flowing to the New World's shores. Here the home of Tampa's proletariat winds its lank Streets under balconies. Labor yokes all races; voices And awnings shout Martinez, Cohen, Carducci!

But O Beloved flaming faces of Latin America, passionate And stern, whose eyes burn with remembrance Of a hundred battles with the world wide foe. Going home, gentlemen, we find no architecture; Home is an old broken wooden box patched With tin or paper, naked within, maybe a hard cot; Maybe, O petit-bourgeois luxury, even two; maybe A decrepit icebox, a table limping on three legs; Shacks whose faces grow black with worry. Where will the rent– two bucks a week– come from? The workers, having forgotten under the chronic Fake smile of the Blue Eagle the feel of labor, Do not recall the names of conquistadors Who first touched Tampa's shores; let the Chamber Trumpet to a posterity of tourists the memory Of Pam filo de Narva ez, Hernando de Soto The immense teeth and spectacles of Teddy.

We know only the third republic, the Roosevelt Who flashes treacherous promises through a cataleptic gain. We remember, gentlemen, the great strike of Thirty-One When we marched to the factory of Sanchez y Haya And on the water tank high above Ybor City Nailed the red flag with hammer and sickle. We remember, too, the terror, the cops who wrecked The face of our leader Hy Gordon, cracked their pistols Through his wrist-bone broke our Union. Let us go, then Comrades, to the Communist meeting; Go in silence; the forgotten man is forgotten, he Reds remembered; they are here illegal, Foregathering secretly in private homes. Tiptoe up the stairway one by one.

Order, compa? eros; Comrade Lopez has the floor. The terror grows, we have no work, we starve; Our wives and children hunger; those who still Labor aridly in the factories (robbed Of the traditional readers) face new wage-cuts; The cops ravage meetings; jail, beat, deport The bravest, wisest workers, those Who know the road to freedom from this hell. The factory gates are closed to Negroes: – Let the black bastards die, let them all die, Let the blessed Blue Eagle de devour these rebellious worms, But let it preserve our profits! Compa? eros, we shall not die; our ranks are but A platoon in that vast army, throughout The world which carries high the proletarian banner Fighting through blood and terror toward the goal.

We who once raised the red banner over Ybor City Shall do our part indeed, striking the needed blows For an America of work and thought for all. Where soil, factory and machine; art, Philosophy and science; love itself Shall be with bread the portion of the people. Mankind looks forward, but the hurt look back: Broken of will, distracted and afraid, They who have had no childhood but the rack Shall yet be judged for what they " ve done or said. And if their feet, once crucified, now drag, We " ll nail them once again upon our scorn: When mankind marches, let the weak not lag, Cursing the time and place where they were born. The past dies, save for those whom it has broken; They will remember whom the world has maimed. Let them be silent!

Things must not be spoken Which hide deep in the thought of man, ashamed: Or, if their lips are bitter and inflamed, Let them speak all by symbol and by token New York 1925 In this black room, midnight and morn are each Aeons away; the open window brings The sea's insistent roar against the beach; Loud in the night the hollow bellboy flings Skyward its melancholy monotones; Above the clamor of the breaking waves Far off its lonely clapper moans Like some despairing idiot who raves Crawling on hands and knees through empty streets To doors that seem familiar, there to weep. While one unconscious twisted knuckle beats For succor, for compassion and for sleep, He rends the silence with a final cry To which the stubborn night makes no reply New York November 1931 The hordes that battle for the world's domain Sweat impatiently within each camp; Once more the blood soaked earth roars with the tramp Of armies thundering across the plain. And now again the long eternal rain Shall drum in darkness taps upon the damp Cracked bodies, or the yellow lonely lamp Of night glow on the entrails of the slain. And we who once awoke from the slow dream Of peace and childhood to behold the sky Broken asunder by the flaming steel Of shells whose death came with a monstrous scream, Shall this time, having lived, know how to die, Rifle in hand, to make a just dream real New York December 1931.