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Like Hegel and Marx, I Stand for Negation
The little churches on their hillsides resound
With song, with prayer, with affirmation
of a God of righteous indignation
and with confirmation of the rectitude
of suit-and-tongue-tied congregations;
and builders of bridges radiate positivist joy
for conceiving erections
like the Verrazano Narrows,
and for supervising their construction, girder by girder,
bolt by bolt,
paycheck by paycheck,
mortgage payment by re-done kitchen.
These typify American dreams
along with the ultimate kisses, shootouts
and stereotyped fade-outs
of Tube and of screen.
Yet all fade like cliches
when face to face with Negation,
with the out-of-work seamen and blistered farmers
who caged the British within the noose-like Charles,
with outraged peasants
blazing the French countryside with their masters' homes,
with sans-culottes opening minds and prisons,
destroying the edifices of human serfdom
while the slaves of Haiti destroyed slavery itself,
with the men and women of Minneapolis, Toledo,
San Francisco, and Flint
whose strikes said "No more profits pumped
from starving bodies, gear-mangled limbs.
Nothing moves,
nothing is built,
no bridges erected, no workers dying in the trying,
but by our say-so."
With the beloved communities of blacks positive in their
negation
whose aggressive suffering plucked Jim Crow
naked
and destroyed Southern traditions of rapine enshrined,
with the women who seized their bodies and their
thoughts
from old propriety
and double standards,
demanded that dads and communities
deal with dirty diapers' joys
and that they themselves help guide
the changing of the world,
negating old traditions
and letting freedom in.
With Hegel and Marx, I stand for Negation.
With the peasants, artisans, slaves, strikers,
beloved communities, and women revolting,
I seek the positive through destruction,
destroying the destroyers,
building new community,
building freedom with rage.
—Sam Friedman
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