To A Revolutionary Girl

Violets peer out in streaks On the covered ribs Of hills, and meet the air In a million trembling Lips on fields throughout the world: Stretch along the highways, Small and mighty in the drip of rain: Dot the base of mountains, Equal purpose in disguise: Signal friendship To the rocks, Take the darkness From cave-outlets And ravines — You are a girl, A revolutionist, a worker Sworn to give the last, undaunted jerk Of your body and every atom Of your mind and heart To every other worker In the slow, hard fight That leads to barricade, to victory Against the ruling swine. Yet, in the softer regions of your heart, The shut-off, personal, illogical Disturbance of your mind, You long for crumpled 'kerchiefs, notes Of nonsense understood Only by a lover. Long for colors on your dresses, Ribboned sleeves, unnecessary buttons: Bits of laughter chased and never Dying: challenge of a hat Buoyant over hair. Youth and sex, distinctions Still unmarred by centuries of pain, Will not be downed, survive In spite of hunger, strikes, and riot-guns, Sternness in the ranks. We frown upon your sensitive demands: We do not like romance In our present time — to us It reeks of flowered screens Over garbage-cans, of pretty words Bringing hollowness, not flesh, To every skeleton. It stamps the living death of Hollywood, The tactics of a factory Shipped in boxes round, price-marked With lying sweetness, trivial Melodrama doping eyes and ears. And yet romance, expelled from actual life, Sneak back in middle age, Impossible in groan and taunt. Their gilt on top, mould underneath, Revolt us — But you are a girl. Your problem cannot be denied. In the Russia of the past Women once pinned flowers To their shoulders, chained to lovers Flogged by snarling guards In the exile of Siberia, And in the Russia of today Men and women, proud of working-hours, Sturdy, far from blood-steeped tinsel, Take their summer vacations On the steppes, in cleaner games, In flowers, pledgers, loyalties, Clear-growing, inevitable, Deepening in their youth. Steal, for an hour, now and then, To your time of violets, the hope Of less impeded tenderness In a freedom yet to come, Then fold it in your heart for unapparent, Secretly unyielding strength On every picket-line throughout the world, Revolutionary girl.