Untitled Poem 1
Consider this colossus of the north
Who says that he’s the scion of Karl Marx,
But is Nietsche Superman, bearing the crown
And arrogating all the prerogatives
of Superman. Forcing the populace
To sacrifice their lives, to shed their blood
And, fed with pan derived from dialectics
Imagine they own the factories and mines,
The fields and homes and all contained therein.
The very ones who deny the possibility
Of God and revelation and of heaven
Proclaim their own infallibility,
Draw sustenance from others, who in turn,
Exploit their underlings—
And this is called the New Day, the New Freedom.
Alas! Poor Russia, whose masses have so long been bled,
Bled from the dawn of history,
The slaves of an ancient Aryan heritage,
The serfs of many generations of feudalism,
Freed by a Czar—and oddly were they freed:
O this freedom, this noble freedom,
You are not longer bound by your landowner,
The air is yours and you may wander in space,
You may visit your cities, change your occupation.
O this freedom, this newly found freedom,
The landlord is exchanged for the money-lender,
The poor muzhik, without education,
Is soon in debt and become debt’s servitor.
O this freedom, this wonderful freedom,
Your landowner is now freed from paternalism,
And you who were a chattel but an asset
Are now a man—to carry a free man’s burdens.
Then came the revolution and the promise
Of a new world, a new life, a Marxist state,
Without the terrors of mass exploitation,
No feudal rent, no bourgeois interest or profit,
You owned the earth and would be happy therein.
Soon Nietsche’s Superman conspired,
Using the same phrases of his forebears,
Organized the state and seized the power,
And called upon the men to sacrifice.
O labor, magnificent labor,
Creator of all the useful things of earth,
Now that you own the factories, the fields, the mines,
You must exploit them to the uttermost,
In order that your fellow workers may share.
O labor, magnificent labor,
You are surrounded so by enemies,
You must work overtime, and offer
Your free time to the State to help preserve
The liberties won through the recent revolution.
O labor, magnificent labor,
You must forego the treasures you have dreamed,
It is contrary to the welfare of others
To own your home, your garden and such things,
These are the phantom-dreams of the bourgeois.
So there is a new Russia,
A Russia in which the echoes of Karl Marx
Are smothered along with all the other cries,
A group of men who never have donned overalls,
Bred in a special manner, and so educated.
That using claptraps words disguised as Marx.
With the full psychology of Friedrich Nietsche,
Squeeze the life-blood and the marrows of the masses,
Offering “bread and circuses” but little else
To races that have never known true freedom.
The feudal state is gone but rent stays on,
The Czarist state is dead but there is profit,
A profit even beyond the wildest dreams
Of capitalist exploiters of other lands,
Drawn from the hard earned pay of laborers,
And the bank is there, though bankers are no more,
So unearned increment is socialized,
To benefit the few, to cramp the many.
The Communist Manifesto is no more,
The workers have lost their chains –
Freedom from chains but not from exploitation,
The proletariat has never existed,
The phrase exist and the myrmidon
Has long replaced the man.
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn her ways”—
This is the final end of Sovietism.
I said: “Ye are gods,” and showed the way
But truth denied by all the world so long,
Finding no resting place among my people,
Who will not realize that they are gods,
Find the world divided in hostile camps,
The one with a mocking type of freedom,
The other with the civilization of the ant.
The concentration camp and all its cruelties,
The forced enslavement of the dissatisfied,
The murder of the dissenters instead of their enlightenment,
And the teachings of Karl Marx made into travesty,
Even as my words have become travesties.
Consider Friedrich Engels.
How could this man, born to luxury,
Living among the enlightened and the learned,
Become the mouth of piece of the laboring classes,
To whom he hardly spoke a word for years.
What social deterministic leaven
Brought him to his extreme ideals,
And why should he, and not a real laborer,
Sustain and bear the brunt of revolution?
Ye are gods. Within your latent consciousness
There is a lurking, shadowy remembrance,
Of your true nature, and your right relation
To all your fellow man.
Whoever suffers, I suffer and you suffer,
Though my eye is full of light and yours opaque,
Yet there is a substance in your subconscious
That makes some feel the pains that bind another –
It was this conscience, this hidden voice of the soul,
This I in thee, dwelling in Friedrich Engels,
That shockened him to life, made him desert
The ways of his forbears, his social class
To help, as he bethought, his fellow man.
I am not come to make a revolution,
To bring the world to socialism,
To free it from capitalism –
Or to accomplish the reverse.
You must be born again, realize your divinity,
And act toward one another as if it were so.
The Commissars toil not, neither do they spin,
Yet Solomon with all his exploitation
With all his heavy burdens on the Israelites,
Could not rival one of these.
I say no more. They will condemn themselves,
Fall into the very law of retribution,
As Karl Marx said, “Every economic system
Has the germs of its own destruction.”
Ye are gods. Ye are gods. Ye are gods.
When your love is so enormous to encompass the earth,
When your heart is so great to involve the world,
War will be no more, and peace will actually come,
Because the understanding has become,
And nothing is beyond the state of perfection.
Ye are gods. Ye are gods. Ye are gods.
The one who puts a binding circle around love
Excludes himself from final emancipation.
Who denies that perfect love casts out all hate?
Who stands up and challenges my words?
If he is a Christian, let him learn to grow in My love;
If he is a believer, let him learn to grow in My love:
If he is a scoffer, let him learn to grow in My love.
There is no peace in parliaments,
In the long haggling over the conference tables,
In the subtle demands for justices and rights,
In craven cries over the sufferings of certain peoples
While callousness remains in regard to others.
This Moral Rearmament Movement,
This modern crusade of Buchman and his cohorts,
This active endeavor to prayer and love and perfection,
Which refuses to recognize enemies among mankind,
Which insists that every person has a soul,
And having a soul within, must be divine,
That speaks outright that love is predominant—
Who can dare stand up against their efforts,
And say, that he is an apostle of lasting peace.
The earth, the sea, the skies were made of love,
The universe, the atom were made of love,
And there is not a dust speck in existence,
Nor a cloud of an idea in the consciousness,
Nor the flickering, of a feeling in the heart,
That ultimately did not rise out of love.
One and for all must I repeat by words:
Love One Another. Then the Commissars will fall,
The subjected masses rises to greet each other,
Drawn by a universal kindliness,
And the underlying principle in man,
That man as man is in kinship one to another.
Then the Commissar will disappear,
And the Frankenstein society disguised as socialism,
Will fall of itself, the robot will be no more,
Man delivered from myrmidonism as from slavery,
And hope be in sight for all the world.
Looking down from the roof of the world,
The gossiping of neighbors,
The caterwauling of politicians,
The complaints of nations against nations,
The number of dead upon the battlefield,
The backbiting which seems so universal,
And the long harangues of clerics and of diplomats,
Seem so small.
Looking down from the roof of the world,
The weeping of a little girl over her broken doll,
The plaint of the lad who has lost his dog,
The hush of the wife who has been bereft in childbirth,
The tears of mothers who sons are killed in war.
The spanking of children by their drunken parents
Seem so huge.