Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin

To my knowledge, no picture exists of me during my last years of college.  Therefore, you must imagine me and my friend, Gary Borders, trudging through the snow in Orono in our long black wool coats.  Gary's hat was classic proletarian, mine was a black Greek fisherman's cap;  our beards the pure righteous darkness of youth.  In our bags were Gramsci and Lenin and Mao; and articles for the Maine Peace Action Committee newsletter. We saw ourselves (sometimes, anyway) as the rearguard of a revolutionary vanguard.  After Vietnam . . . before anti-nukes . . .Nicaragua was a chance be on the right side for a change . .  lost Lefties, really. Who knew what lay before us in the coming decades?  Certainly we didn't.  We imagined a revolution of some kind . . . listened to our Holly Near and looked back on the pure politics of the 60's.  We knew that it was up to us, up to the 'New Intellectuals' to define the cause, to understand and articulate what was the motor force of History.  Who knew?

Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin


We sit huddled in our dingy kitchen
over a pot of chicken soup.
Bleary-eyed and tired,
I think of
Russian peasant suppers,
of heavy boots on earthen floors
thick-bearded men and broad shouldered
women in scarves.
I think of
kulaks, purges, police;
of knocks on doors,
laughing apparatchiks,           of Stalin.
Of huddled men in the arctic night.
I think 
and am reminded that 
the struggle goes on
                               and on
                                           and on.




February, 1980