I mourn and celebrate this anti-war revolutionary, the democratic captain at the evanescent port. A lightning kindled by righteousness and mercy.
She, and her fellow synaptic electricians of necrotic cities, laboured in the fog of Krupp’s factories of Venoms and Fangs, conjoined with the merchants of Blackmail and the editors of the Bogs of Black Grease, the compositors of the perennial witch-hunters’ gazettes, and of the 14-18 barbarism that summoned new flocks of malevolent ravens, fattened on human eyes under the imprisoned Pleiades.
These were the carnivores of Magdeburg, Austerlitz, Verdun…
Rosa taught that as a young eagle learns to fly by spreading her wings and gathering the sinews in flight, so the people soar only through concentrated efforts at enlightened self-government: the naissance of an order of discovered humans alienated from dominance and cruelty.
I mourn and celebrate this anti-war revolutionary, the democratic captain at the evanescent port. A lightning kindled by righteousness and mercy.
This poem was first published in the book “Revolutionary Peacemaking: Writings for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence” (Democratic Thought, 2019, pp. 527, http://democraticthought.org/revolutionary-peacemaking-writings-for-a-culture-of-peace-and-nonviolence).
Daniel Jakopovich