Workers’ Day: Tear Up the Calendar!

Workers’ Day: Tear Up the Calendar!

S. Rouzbeh

Workers’ Day

does not come from desk calendars;

it comes from grief bursting

in the depths of Yurt,

from flames unleashed in Asaluyeh,

from lungs that, instead of oxygen,

inhale the smoke of capital.

For years

smooth talkers

earned their bread by invoking the worker’s name;

paraded for the worker behind podiums,

and in private

signed the dismissal order.

The worker created bread,

but of the wheat

received only the smell of straw.

The worker stitched towers to the sky,

but was

beneath the poverty line

buried.

Enough.

A worker does not die in the mine;

in the darkness of irresponsibility

a life is extinguished.

Does not fall in the street;

beneath the rubble of rotten promises

is brought down.

Those calloused hands

are living title deeds to this soil;

but in glass offices,

the worker was named

‘production costs’

and crossed out.

Today

to speak of bread

is to speak of life;

of the right to organise,

of a cry without fear,

of a wage that smells of life,

not of blood and ash.

Workers’ Day

is not a day of flowers and congratulations

and smiles for the shop window;

it is a day of reckoning.

A day when the sweat of the brow

must no longer vanish into the soil;

it must flow,

must become a river,

must wash away the walls

raised on the backs of suffering.

These hands

are no longer raised in supplication;

these hands

have parted ways

with silence.