Workers’ Day: Tear Up the Calendar!
S. Rouzbeh
۱۱ اردیبهشت ۱۴۰۵

Workers’ Day is placed in mines, industrial fires and the struggle for bread, life and the right to organise.

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.

Source: https://srouzbeh.com/en/posts/archive-84f2ee4b-e314-3d2e-f70a-49e228a829de
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