Solidarity and Struggle - poems for today

Please share with us any poems of solidarity and struggle

Poem by Osip Mandelstam

You took away all the oceans and all the room,

You gave me my shoe-size on earth with bars around it,

Where did it get you? Nowhere.

You left me my lips and they shape words even in silence

Thanks Mal

AS I GROW OLD I WILL MARCH NOT SHUFFLE As I grow old I will not shuffle to the beat of self-interest and make that slow retreat to the right. I will be a septuagenarian insurrectionist marching with the kids. I shall sing ‘La Marseillaise’, whilst brandishing homemade placards that proclaim ‘DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING’. I will be an octogenarian obstructionist, and build unscalable barricades from bottles of flat lemonade, tartan blankets and chicken wire. I will hurl prejudice upon the brazier’s fire. I will be a nonagenarian nonconformist, armed with a ballpoint pen and a hand that shakes with rage not age at politicians’ latest crimes, in strongly worded letters to The Times. I will be a centenarian centurion and allow injustice no admittance. I will stage longstanding sit-ins. My mobility scooter and I will move for no-one. And when I die I will be the scattered ashes that attach themselves to the lashes and blind the eyes of racists and fascists. Brian Bilston

Thanks Tony

Spoken word by Benjamin Wellington

Thanks Elaine