Solidarnoś ć Poem by John a'Beckett

Splash of red paint in the rain, blot
on stone of a Soviet rail cutting
wall, shock of its into rock
rock therapeutic All
passengers streaming to
future condition, what in
the down-pour it happens to
stand for, the distant, insistent
if fleeting meaning

train’s sudden slam halt, the fault
ripples a conscience out of
the snow window, not cleaning
the letters right off, cannot quite
mar the hard wash of the far
too-fast future steaming, a bit
like an old shout, back of
the loud flash, din of the recent
graffiti screaming.

Need to recall it all? Events
roll into mind, things we all
know: that a loyal Party crane
operator Walentynowicz –she
wanted simple humane things
Sufficient conditions for her to be
good at her job, get it done.

Walesa. The long meetings
in smoke-filled and talk-thick
halls; Marxist rhetoric hacked
on by the Party hacks. Gdansk
dockyards and then all of Poland
All that Marxist abstraction
Suddenly-strikes into action

From Silesia, Gwiazda, Kuron
Backed her complaint
And the news gets to Moscow
The politburo ready
as in Prague with tanks
Perhaps the crack-down partly lost
in the funerals, Gorbachev’s gallant
Perestroika, glaznost

Embarrassment of the Party, its
presence become absurd
Soviet stability on the brink
of collapse and to think
Marx invented the word meant
to remain an abstraction
Suddenly Poland...89
In a few mere months a bend,
quick turn of events and
an end- all those years of
Communist garbosh slosh
down the drain, soap
suds in a car wash.

Keep a tight grip on your sword
Sleeping Knight- Action
sparked off in a word
that rain might wash off
but on the mind will still
remain, never forget
end of the years of absurd
soviet kabosh. A word
slapped smart on a wall and
not yet fading off:


Solidarnoś ć !