Author Information
I Really Dislike Political Poetry, But Sometimes Ya Gotta Give In
Aristocrats and the middle class sneered at the provocations
that brought the poor and disenfranchised to demonstrations.
They sought no concord or peace, nor attempted to discuss
the demonstrators discontent, but called them all riotous.
They gave them a taste of law and order back in nineteen five,
shooting them down in the Moscow streets, leaving few alive.
But in the year of our Saving Lord's Grace, nineteen seventeen,
a new premiere was in the making, a different act and scene.
Aristocrats, nobles, and middle class---like bullies in shifting cliques---
sloganed their prooftexts of law and order, in the name of the czar.
Then that bastard Lenin threw a party for Bolsheviks,
and the aristocrats and middle class faced a change much worse by far.
The crimson stain of shed blood was spread by the rise of the new Red Star.
But Lenin had spoken openly of exactly what he should do---
he called them the People's Enemies, and stood them against a wall,
and shot them dead with cheaply made rifles; most of them dead, if not all.
And with them a lot of innocent Christians, too . . . .
The lesson of this is that human beings bear the burden of this curse,
that when we attempt to suppress real problems, we only make them worse.
Starward
