On A Field Of Red: A Poem About Lenin

Good intentions are not enough.

What do you do? When the world around you is twisted and tainted, when the most hellish injustice passes before your wandering eyes, nourishment for the beast whose hunger has no end: beggars, thieves, filthy factory barracks, 3 year olds whose only toys are the lethal cogs and spinning wheels of iron machines, whose waking nightmare dreams carry them across the deadly jungle of the factory floor and into the cracks and crevices that mark the haggard, guilt-ridden, broken faces of their mothers. 

Innocence is no defence against the hounds of hell and cold streets swallow the prisoners of the night: child prostitutes who sell their bodies to the unwashed crowds – draining the excess lust of an oppressed people until its irrepressible raging consumes their flesh, snaps their bones, and leaves them done to death in a broken stairwell or a dirty back alley – their bodies, limbs, the organic tools of life itself, fuel for the city’s medical schools as they teach their students how to save the arms and legs of those who can afford the cost of living.

What do you say to cold eyes, lonely eyes, angry eyes, sad eyes, dead eyes? What is left for you to be?

For once you know you can never go back – from the Moskva to the Neva, rivers flow black with the tears of the condemned.

The ghosts of reality will never leave you alone; plunging at you in your sleep and gnawing at the edges of your dreams.  Tranquil boyhood homes transformed into citadels of lies – beautiful green fields, rushing streams and warm breezes screaming with the desperate cruelty of distended bellies gorged on clay.

What is left, trapped in darkness, trapped in hell, except to be the vanguard of the new dawn, the light to the hopeless, a living symbol of who they can be, a living hammer breaking living chains? What is left but to be a light? A spark.

What is left, in a world where 99.9% of politicians are servitors of a criminal system, except to have the courage to stand among that 0.01% who call themselves revolutionaries? To stand amongst those who have cast themselves into the fire, crossed the threshold into endless struggle, sacrificed privilege and comfort in the name of a dream they may never see fulfilled.  To throw oneself, in terror, into the unknown; navigating storm-tossed seas in search of new lands just barely visible on the far horizon and shrouded by enough reefs and shoals to make any sane man turn back in fear.  But the revolutionary leader is no martyr, no willing sacrifice upon that bloody political altar that eternally thirsts for the blood of the ambitious.

No, he is there to win!

An elder brother swinging from the hangman’s noose, a grieving mother, a naive bunch of idealists, a broken tribe of assassins, a shattered lonely Parisian commune that never had a chance, Spanish anarchists ground into dust because they refused to stand together against a pathetic, ill-disciplined, government army that could barely crawl let alone walk! This time we’ll walk a different way.

No, he is not here to play the martyr!

For there is only one thing that the living can do for the dead, one thing that can sooth the pain of those alive but barely living, those standing yet barely walking, those working yet barely surviving, those broken yet yearning to be whole again.  One thing! And that is to win, and to keep winning; to form up lines and never break them; to achieve the unthinkable because the organization is unshakable.

So when you ask, why won’t he let you give a dissenting opinion? He will respond that your dissenting opinion means more dead children, more tiny hands shackled, more tiny hearts with no love, and more tiny brains uneducated.  Why does he dislike debate? Because there is no time.  Why is he so hard? Because enough is enough.  Why is he so damn authoritarian? Because without discipline we lose and losers don’t make revolutions.  There’s only one way out of hell: we can’t afford to be innocent and we can’t afford to play nice when our only playmates are devils and fiends.   

Words mean nothing without action.

The greatest of warriors are born with the taste of injustice on their tongues and in a shackled land, Russian Simbirsk has spawned a Spartacus.  But he knows in his righteous might that he is nothing but a symbol, an inspiration, an organizer – for the people make revolution just as gods are made through the looking glass of oppressed eyes burning with a secret power, a strength that was never thought possible amid the rubble of crushed dreams.  But now the impossible has become reality: a thousand vast hopes painted on a field of red.  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin born anew – a revolutionary in full flower.

A life runs over with hopes, fears, exile and return – sparks fly and finally fire sweeps the land as one hundred million hearts burst into flame.  It is 1917 and the spring wind sweeps away the dust of winter beneath an April sun.  And the world hears a cry fifty years in the making.  The streets rebound to marching feet, the creaking of open gates and the beckoning of a million hands as dark clouds begin to break upon the anvil of history. Statues and old gods shatter as the child looks up from the oppressive spinning of the power loom to the sound of distant thunder rebounding from pavements watered in blood and the voices of a risen people. Ten days that shook the world! New words rise with the dawn and echo though time and space: “My name is Vladimir, I am the revolutionary, and I am here to win!”The impossible has become reality: a thousand vast hopes painted on a field of red.  In autumn’s ashes a new man, a new world is born and bright eyes stare into the future that stretches on endlessly.