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Wednesday, April 06, 2022

Socialist Sonnet No. 60

 

As Then, Now

 

Then Vietnam. And ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh’

Was the chant by a hundred thousand, more,

In Grosvenor Square. Militant anti-war,

Pro Hanoi, ‘Vietcong are going to win!’

And win they did, B52s undone

By bicycles and the body bagged dead:

Surely, surely, the future would be red.

But then the reckoning, what had been won?

Low wage work and long laborious hours

As life in the red turned out to be debt

Servicing profit. Legacy of Tet

Was securing of capital’s powers.

Now Ukraine. Though sides have been rearranged,

So many dead and nothing will have changed.

 

D. A.

 

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