Poems by Meridel LeSueur

Communal Global Day

Let us seek each other in the villages of the earth,
In the root dark where we live in the dust,
Find us singing in the underground vein, the germinal seed,
in the returning sun,
And bring our goodness to enormous, fertile and perpetual harvest,
Toward zeniths of noon.

Toward total expansions in crops of brotherhood and sisterhood.
Let us await each other in the village field,
In the new year, risen in ancestral dust, from the furrow,
From the loom of the people where, amid lamentations
We have loomed our life in pollen;
Where the leaves forgive the root
and our children rise in perpetual sunrise, in immense globular light.
We await each other!

The light returns on no enemy faces,
But upon the communal chorus,
Roused in villages of the earth, to cry salute and sing,
Shout in choruses of millions,
Rising toward communications, toward extremities of nadirs
Of total expansions, in the entire solar light, on all flesh,
On all fields and all villages
Roused from sleep, rouse us,
Let us seek each other and move from the violent, the broken, the predatory,
To the enormous and myriad fertile and impregnated harvest,
the global village
We sing with you in choruses of millions.

ARISE!

Meridel wrote this poem when she attended the Third World Conference on the status of women in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985 for the“UN Decade of Women.”

They came, bright over the old African horizon
They came, wave after wave with their wounds wrapped in flowered woven bandages
They rose in great waves, earth in their flesh
They came out of slavery upon which the western world was built.
They came appearing in their massive soaring power.
They came rising out of the mortgaged stolen country.
They came out of the corrupt city of Nairobi,
the skyscrapers actually imbedded in the
starving breasts of thousands of farmers and workers.
The property sign brazenly, Standard Oil,
Exxon, General Motors, all the predators from my country
now looting the earth and the cheap labor of living beings.
They came in the thunder, carrying their dead children.
They drummed and danced and shook the gourds
in flesh and power and survival
Don’t stop me, the Sudan woman cried, I came to speak of hunger.
Don’t stop me, I appear at last.
I am not supposed to be here, I was not supposed to survive.
We are supposed to be gone.
But we appear in the thunder of our solidarity.
We claim our earth
We claim our flesh
We have been nought
We claim our earth
We claim our flesh
We have been nought
We shall be all, we shall be all.
I saw them. I am an old woman and I began to dance.
I will never be afraid again.
I will never feel alone again
Dying in the old deathly world with the murderers.
Assassins. Vultures.
I will never leave the rising power of the oppressed.
The earth shall rise on new foundations,
dancing, singing and the touch of love
and the hosanna of freedom
dancing, singing and the touch of love
and the hosanna of freedom
dancing, singing and the touch of love
the hosanna of freedom, the hosanna of freedom, the hosanna of freedom
They come.

No Enemy Faces

None of it was true about our enemies.
   We have none.
Women never birth enemy faces
An enemy face is never born
No walls, barriers, closed wombs
The barren and the breastless summer
   sings
To the face of lovers.
Birth is with others
   and given.