Anti-lamentation
A poem by Sam Friedman
Sometimes, when hot and tired,
I wonder why I dream
of future societies
where all can live
fulfilled.
Won’t the warming kill us long before,
driven by the metastatic cancer
of capital’s neverending need for more?
But then I think:
Maybe so.
But maybe not.
And while we wait the decades
before we know what doom awaits us,
think of the miracles of love
we can create
if our angry crowds banish capital
from off the Earth.
We can build dikes together,
load ships with grain
for starving survivors
in South Africa, the Italian
Archipelago, and the migrants
after the deluge sinks Florida
like Atlantis long before.
And as we work together
to save what can be saved,
perhaps build the long-sought,
long-lost
beloved community,
dike by dike,
grain by grain.
And perhaps even salvage some new civilization
where our remnant few
can thrive among the ruins.
Featured Image credit: Molly Costello; modified by Tempest.
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Samuel R. Friedman is a lifelong social activist and long-time socialist. His writings on social justice topics include about 50 publications on workers’ movements, how we might create socialism, political economy, racism or social movements—including Teamster Rank and File (Columbia University Press, 1982) and What happened in Ukraine (2015). He currently is a research professor of Population Health at a leading New York university and previously the Director of the Institute for Infectious Disease Research at National Development and Research Institutes in New York. He has published two books of poetry (most recently A Precious Residue: Poems that Ponder Efforts to Spark a Working-Class Socialism in the 1970s and After, as well as several chapbooks and many individual poems. He is the author of over 500 publications on HIV, COVID-19, STI and drug use epidemiology, prevention, and harm reduction. He is a member of the Tempest Collective, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Central Jersey Coalition against Endless War, the People’s CDC, and the Ukraine Solidarity Network. He can be reached at sam4wp@netscape.net.