Emma Goldman in her youth. |
I discovered yesterday in my search for topics that Emma Goldman,
whose grave I recently visited on a pilgrimage
to the Haymarket Memorial in Forest Home Cemetery, and Helen Keller,
who had fascinated me since seeing The
Miracle Worker and reading a paperback
biography I ordered from a Scholastic
Book Club flyer shared a common
birthday on that date.
You
know, if you have visited here before, that such calendar coincidences trigger an inexplicable urge to commit poetry.
Most
people recognize Goldman’s name as America’s
most famous anarchist. They may be surprised to learn that she was also a
famous lecturer whose talks on theater,
religion, women’s rights, and free
love drew as much attention in their day as her calls to smash the state and end capitalism.
Keller’s
profound advocacy of Socialism and
the IWW has largely been white washed from her public image. But that is slowly changing as folks on
the left slowly become aware that she was a comrade and fellow worker.
Helen Keller. |
Birthday Sisters
Emma and Helen
Emma Goldman
June 27,1869, Konvo, Imperial Russian Lithuania
Helen Keller,
June 27, 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama, USA
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your
revolution—Emma Goldman
…there is no king who has not had a slave among his
ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.—Helen Keller.
You might not
suspect that they were sisters.
Emma with her
square jaw and carelessly attended hair,
gray eyes peering through
those old fashion pinze nez spectacles
perched upon her nose,
the urban smells of coal fire,
delivery horse
dung and workman’s sweat
clinging to her
frumpy clothes,
speech meticulously
enunciated
barely betraying
here and there
a Yiddish trace.
Helen, who would
have been a delicate beauty
in here youth
were it not for those disconcerting,
unfocused eyes,
Confederate grace and slave cotton
wealth
a mantle on her delicate shoulders,
the sweet lilt of a gentlewoman
lost to grunts and moans.
But wait….
These two knew what it was like
to be a stranger, an exile,
an alien other
and ultimately what it was like
to be a celebrated curiosity.
They learned as
a Jew
and as a side show freak,
as women, after all,
what oppression was
but also that they
were not alone—
They swam in a
sea of oppression
and learned early
of the solidarity of the school
against the sharks
that would consume them.
Maybe the world
expected little else
from the Jewess
who threw her lot early
with the filthy anarchists
who made bombs
and plotted an attentat
like the job she pulled
passing the pistol
to her lover, for god sake,
to plug Henry Clay Frick.
But the world
was aghast
when the delicate Radcliffe flower,
who had charmed Mark Twain,
Alexander Graham Bell,
and Teddy Roosevelt,
raised the Red Flag
and fell side by side
with the laborers,
the unemployed,
the despised—even the Negros!
The atheist anarchist
and the Socialist Wobbly
who dabbled in Swedenborgism
and a mystic Red Jesus
did not agree on details,
they might have enjoyed
a friendly debate
each being a master
of the platform.
But each in her
own way
was steadfast to the end
of her long life
for a revolution of liberation
and the ultimate triumph
of beauty.
I imagine
sometimes
that as they each
traversed the country
on lecture tour or
vaudeville circuit
if they ever crossed paths
in say, a railway station
in Omaha or a
hotel lobby in Akron
and fell into each other’s arms
sobbing—
“Sister, sister,
I have found you!”
—Patrick
Murfin
Helen Keller as a Joan of Arc type hero leading the working people of the world to triumph in an alagorical scene from her 1919 silent film Deliverence. |
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