April 26, 2012
Mike and Chuck welcomed Len Osanic and Marc Beaudin. Len gave us a report of his reecent extended interviews with Harvey and Lee author John Armstrong, in Hawaii; Marc shared his thoughts and a poem (text below).
[audio:https://newdream.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NAD_april_26_2012.mp3|titles=NAD_april_26_2012]Right Click do download NAD_april_26_2012
The Shovel Rights Knock Knock Joke
by Marc Beaudin
“We defend the shovel’s right to not have to dig its own grave.”
–Mike Cloud Devine
We hold this truth to be self-evident:
That we are endowed by the Universal and Cosmic Dance of Creation,
by the Eternal song on the lips of the Mother of all that’s green except money,
by Odin who hung himself from the World Tree to wrench the Runes from the hands of the Nameless & bring us poetry,
by the simple fact of our existence,
we are endowed with certain unalienable rights
that among these are Life, Liberty & the pursuit of not Happiness, but True Bliss
& more than that–
We have the right to a star-filled night sky,
a sunset unscarred by smog & contrails,
& a horizon free of smokestacks, reactors and radio towers
We have the right to mud between our toes,
snowflakes on our tongues,
& Spring-drunk air in our lungs
We have the right to our rivers & aquifers
free of pipelines,
our minds free of corpraganda,
& our airwaves free of hate
We have the right to dance awkwardly, to sing out of tune,
to make fools of ourselves & be politically obscure,
to think globally & act up,
to make a mockery of all that is holy,
& to hold sacred the most ridiculous forms of tomfooleric shenanigans
We have the right to use words like “tomfooleric” in our poems
We have the right to work or not work,
to do work that does not turn us into robots
or zombies or products or hazardous waste sites
To do work that brings beauty & comfort & pride & illumination
& to stop work anytime the streets need the vote of our bodies & voices
We have the right to our shovels,
to use them to dig potatoes, firepits or graves for tyrants
to build sand castles where no king is welcome
to bang them together & call it music,
to lay them down and call it a strike,
to raise them up & call it revolution,
to drive them into the ground & call it
“Knock, Knock?”
“Who’s there?”
“Chickens.”
“Chickens who?”
“Chickens coming home to roost.”
–April 2012
Marc thanks Mike devine for inspiring him to write this poem. See Mike singing Shovel Ready here.