Music in Montreal: Our song, “The Internationale!”
The world was pregnant
with two revolutions—fraternal twins—
Newborns cresting, crowning—pushing violently
from contracting wombs…We rejoiced, showering
them with
Revolutionary love!
Morphing, miraculously in tune;
the hungry hundreds’ voices rose
on salt swollen feet
In French, Farsi, Spanish, Russian, Tagalog,
Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, Portuguese, Japanese,
Mandarin, Cantonese, Creole, Korean, English, etc.
Piston fists pumping to sun, stars, moon—
Our universe. Majestic incantation, “We have
been naught,
We shall be all…” Multilingual blending, crescendoing
like tympani spreading spinal chills—Then snatching
breath from our chests with mighty, wow finish:
“The Internationale shall be the Human race!!”
Too soon we’d see these infant revolutions ripped
from their cribs—from their
Mothers’ and
Midwives’ lactating breasts—And inexperienced
Arms…
And, yet, our song still resounds in jungles,
clandestine forests, barren deserts. Still echoes
off barbed wire and blackened bars of torture
chambers in filthy hellholes…
Our song’s polyglot harmony occasionally rising in
Surprising spaces;
belted out sometimes over orchestration of the world’s
‘richest’ men’s space boy-toys. Over Intelligence
Kings of white nationalist internationals’ Multi-polar
missile music/nuclear nightmare suites conducted by
Truncheon.
Our song still cuts through capitalist-roader nights
with a thousand eyes and facial recognition. Surveillance
state symphonies composed on elephant-eared walls and
eagle-eyed streets, scored on bloodstained rectangular rags
Our song still cries out, “Arise ye prisoners of
starvation…” Not, “ye yachtsmen flying the Jolly Roger for
spheres of Influence…”
Not, “ye capitalist-roaders becoming billionaires on pearls of
Toilers’ sweat…”
Our song still cries out, “A better world’s in birth…” And
“ The earth shall rise on new foundations…”
suggesting cooks can govern—the “human race” includes
Women, Black, Brown, LGBTQ+-And
Toilers must be deciders!
Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at: GoFundMe and PayPal.
Detroit police killed hundreds of unnamed Blacks in response to the civil rights movement, revealing why most of today’s proposals to make police more accountable are bound to fail, and how we can
After first being forced to live in chemically toxic communities, Black and Brown people are then incarcerated in jails where they cannot escape some of the worst pollution in the nation.
The name Black Panther is a box-office draw, but can cinematic sympathy be extended to the Panthers who are still living and breathing in this country’s prisons?
The death of Chad president Idris Deby in fighting with rebels last week is a loss for the US and France, the top imperial powers in Africa, said Dr.
In his first 60 days in office, Biden “had already deported more people to Haiti than Donald Trump deported in all of 2020, said Daoud Andre, a Brooklyn-based radio host and organi
