Espada - Vivas to those who have failed: poems

ALSO BY MARTN ESPADA POETRY The Meaning of the Shovel The Trouble Ball Soldados en el Jardn La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas The Republic of Poetry Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (19822002) A Mayan Astronomer in Hells Kitchen Imagine the Angels of Bread City of Coughing and Dead Radiators Rebellion is the Circle of a Lovers Hands Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction The Immigrant Iceboys Bolero TRANSLATION The Blood That Keeps Singing:
Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vlez
(with Camilo Prez-Bustillo) EDITOR His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Vctor Jara El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry Poetry Like Bread:
Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press ESSAYS The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive Zapatas Disciple Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Copyright 2016 by Martn Espada All rights reserved
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Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT Dedicated to the memory of my father Francisco Luis Frank Espada (19302014) Contents Adjusting type size may change line breaks.

Landscape mode may help to help to preserve line breaks. These poems have appeared or will appear in the following publications, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made: Aethelon : The Socialist in the Crowd The American Poetry Review : The Discovery of Archaeopteryx, The Goddamned Crucifix, Here I Am, The Sinking of the San Jacinto , Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press): The Right Foot of Juan de Oate, Hard-Handed Men of Athens Cutthroat : Haunt Me Drunken Boat (online): The Right Foot of Juan de Oate Goodbye, Mxico : Poems of Remembrance (Texas Review Press): The Right Foot of Juan de Oate The Great Falls : Poems About Paterson, New Jersey : Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 The Great Sympathetic: Walt Whitman and the North American Review (North American Review Press): Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues, How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way Hanging Loose : Flowers and Bullets, From the Rubiyt of Fenway Park , The Right Foot of Juan de Oate Harvard Review : The Shamrock Irish Examiner : The Shamrock La Bloga (online): El Moriviv Michigan Quarterly Review : A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body, Marshmallow Rice Krispie Treat Machu Picchu Milk : The Right Foot of Juan de Oate Morning Star : The Socialist in the Crowd, How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way Naked Punch: Haunt Me, The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch, The Right Foot of Juan de Oate, How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way, A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body Nautilus II : Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire North American Review : Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World, Mad Love, Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues The Norton Introduction to Literature (W. W. Norton): Of the Threads That Connect the Stars Paterson Literary Review : After the God That Rose Like the God of Geese, Bills to Pay, Once Thundering Penguin Herds Darkened the Prairie, Chalkboard on the Wall of a Diner in Providence, Rhode Island the Morning After George Zimmerman Was Acquitted in the Shooting Death of Trayvon Martin, an Unarmed Black Teenager Ploughshares : Of the Threads That Connect the Stars Poetry Salzburg Review : Mad Love, Bills to Pay, The Shamrock Policing the Planet (Verso): How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way Post Road : There But Not There Prairie Schooner : El Moriviv, On the Hovering of Souls and Balloon Animals, Hard-Handed Men of Athens The Progressive : Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio, The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch Saudades: Poems by Jos Joe Gouveia (Casa Mariposa Press): Here I Am The Stinging Fly : The Man in the Duck Suit Stonecoast Review : Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio, The Right Foot of Juan de Oate, Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World Many thanks to the community of poets that supported and inspired this work: Jack Ageros, Doug Anderson, Chris Brandt, Sarah Browning, Sandra Cisneros, Patrick Cotter, Kwame Dawes, Chard deNiord, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Gouveia, Sam Hamill, Major Jackson, Paul Mariani, Rich Michelson, John Murillo, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, Oscar Sarmiento, Lauren Schmidt, Julia Shipley, Gary Soto, Rich Villar and Afaa Weaver. Many thanks also to the Poetry Society of America for the 2013 Shelley Memorial Award, and to Andy Shallal for the 2014 Busboys and Poets Award. Vivas to those who have faild! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! Walt Whitman The newspapers said the strikers would hoist the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills of Paterson.

At the strike meeting, a dyers helper from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor, lifted up his hand and said Here is the red flag : brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away for six dollars a week in the dye house. He sat down without another word, sank back into the fumes, name and face rubbed off by oblivions thumb like a Roman coin from the earth of his birthplace dug up after a thousand years, as the strikers shouted the only praise he would ever hear. He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young, but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab. He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentinos back. His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife. Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery.

Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones. Blood for blood , cried Tresca: at his signal, thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea. Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines. Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his one good eye on Reed and told him of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill to escape the rain and listen to the weavers.

The bluecoats told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business, Reed said: Poet . The judge said: Twenty days in the county jail. Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs, the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill.

The strikers taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write: Theres war in Paterson . After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa. The cops on horseback charged into the picket line. The weavers raised their hands across their faces, hands that knew the loom as their fathers hands knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers. Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line, the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike.