This Spring Song

Class is taking a spring break and will be back with our regular programming on April 20th. For now, enjoy a moment of seasonal poetry with a few comrades across time and space: Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, Langston Hughes, and Ada Limón. Happy early Earth Day and May Day, listeners! 

Read on this episode:

- Rosa Luxemburg’s letters to Hans Diefenbach, March 30, 1917 & Sophie Liebkecht, May 2, 1917

- Bertolt Brecht, "Morning Address to a Tree Named Green" (1927) & "Spring 1938" (1938). These are casual links for convenience; official English translations for these aren’t readily available online. 

- Langston Hughes, “An Earth Song” (1925) 

- Ada Limón, “Instructions on Not Giving Up” (2017), republished in The Carrying (2021)  

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi comrades, I'm Michaela, the current chair of DSA's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC, and a member of North New Jersey DSA. We're going to take a couple weeks off from our regular class programming and we'll be back on the air at the end of the month. But hold on, before you go, I'm going to read some springtime socialist poetry and letters. Spring is meaningful for socialists. May Day is a traditional holiday for many northern cultures celebrating the movement of spring into summer, and it's our adopted day for celebrating our movement and working class struggle internationally. Spring is a time of emergence and growth, shifting from darkness into light. But it isn't also without its moods and reflections. What I have selected here are some excerpts and poems by a few comrades past, and one contemporary poem that just fits. It was hard to pick just a few. I hope you'll enjoy listening and that they'll remind you that as hard as the winter is, as hard as our struggle in the midst of darkness can feel, there is life, love, and beauty emergent in our world, and we're fighting for it to flourish everywhere for everyone. Happy early Earth Day and Happy Early May Day. Before we dive in, a reminder that class is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter, NPEC's Monthly Newsletter, using the provided links. Rosa Luxemburg to Hans Deifenbach, March 30th, 1917. I have never experienced a spring as consciously and fully as the one last year at this time. Maybe that's because it came after a year in cell 69, or because I now know every bush and every blade of grass intimately, and so can follow the unfolding and find detail. Do you remember how only a few years ago in Zudende we tried to guess the identity of a yellow flowering shrub? You proposed that we accept it as laburnum, but of course it was no such thing. How glad I am that three years ago I suddenly plunged into the study of botany the way I do everything, with all my fire and passion, with my entire being, so that the world, the party, and my work ceased to exist for me, and only one passion possessed me day and night. To be outdoors roaming about the springtime fields, gathering armfuls of plants, returning home to sort them, identify them, and put them between the pages of my notebooks. I lived through the whole springtime then as though in a fever. How I suffered when I sat in front of a new little plant and was unable for a long time to identify or classify it. Many times I almost fainted so that Gertrude became cross and threatened to take the plants away from me. But now, in recompense, I'm at home in the green realm of plants. I've conquered it, taken it by storm with passion, and anything you grasp with fervor takes root inside you. Last spring I had a partner in these wanderings, Karl Liebnecht. Perhaps you know how he'd been living for many years past, always busy with parliaments, sessions, commissions, discussions, always harried and stressed, always leaping from the train to the electric tram and from the tram into a cab, all his pockets crammed with notepads, his arms full of freshly purchased newspapers, which he could not possibly have found time to read, his body and soul covered with the dust of the street, and yet all the while with an amiable, youthful smile on his lips. Last spring I forced him to stop for a while, to remember that there is a world beyond the Reichstag and the Landtag. And on several occasions he strolled with Sonia and me in the fields and the botanical gardens. He could take a childish delight in the sight of a birch tree with its young catkins. Once we trekked right across the fields to Marenfeld. You know that route? Remember? We went that way together one autumn and had to walk through stubble. But last April with Carl, it was in the morning, and the fields were a fresh green from the winter sowing. A warm wind was chasing grey clouds this way and that across the sky in fits and starts. And one moment the fields were sparkling in bright sunshine, and the next moment they darkened to an emerald green in the shadows. It was a magnificent display as we walked along in silence. Suddenly Carl stopped and began leaping about strangely and with a serious expression on his face. I looked at him in astonishment and was even a little alarmed. What's the matter with you? I asked. He merely answered, I'm so blissfully happy. At which, of course, we fell about laughing. Rosa to Sophie Leibnicht, May 2nd, 1917. Do you remember how in April last year I called you up on the telephone at 10 in the morning to come at once to the botanical gardens and listen to the nightingale, which was giving a regular concert there? We hid ourselves in a thick shrubbery and sat on the stones beside a trickling streamlet. When the nightingale had ceased singing, there suddenly came a plaintive, monotonous cry that sounded something like glick glick glick glick. I said I thought it must be some kind of marsh bird, and Carl agreed, but we never learned exactly which bird it was. Just fancy. I heard the same call suddenly here from somewhere close at hand a few days ago in the early morning. And I burned with impatience to find out what the bird was. I could not rest until I'd done so. But it is not a marsh bird, after all. It is a rhineck, a grey bird larger than a sparrow. It gets its name because of the way in which, when danger threatens, it tries to intimidate its enemies by quaint gestures and writhings of the neck. It lives only on ants, collecting them with its sticky tongue, just like an anteater. The Spaniards call it Hormiguero, the ant bird. Mordeque has written some amusing verses on the rhineck, and Ugo Wolf has set them to music. Now that I found out what bird it is that gave the plaintiff cry, I'm so pleased as if someone had given me a present. You might write to Carl about it. He will like to know. You ask what I am reading. Natural science for the most part. I am studying the distribution of plants and animals. Yesterday I was reading about the reasons for the disappearance of songbirds in Germany. The spread of scientific forestry, horticulture, and agriculture have cut them off from their nesting places and their food supply. More and more, with modern methods, we're doing away with hollow trees, wastelands, brushwood, fallen leaves. I feel sore at heart. I was not thinking so much about the loss of pleasure for human beings, but I was so much distressed at the idea of the stealthy and inexorable destruction of these defenseless little creatures that the tears came into my eyes. I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that I am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home, even in the scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than at one of our party congresses. I can say that to you, for you will not promptly suspect me of treason to socialism. You know I really hope to die at my post in a street fighter in prison. But my innermost personality belongs more to my tomtits than to the comrades. Bertolt Bracht, morning address to a tree named Green, 1927. Green, I owe you an apology. I couldn't sleep last night because of the noise of the storm. When I looked out, I noticed you swaying like a drunken ape. I remarked on it. Today this yellow sun is shining in your bare branches. You're shaking off a few tears still, Green, but now you know your own worth. You have fought the bitterest fight of your life. Vultures were taking an interest in you. And now I know it's only by your inexorable flexibility that you were still upright this morning. In view of your success, it's my opinion today. It was no mean feat to grow up so tall in between the tenements, so tall, green, that the storm can get at you as it did last night. Langston Hughes, Earth Song, 1925. It's an earth song. And I've been waiting long for an earth song. It's a spring song. And I've been waiting long for a spring song. Strong as the shoots of a new plant. Strong as the bursting of new buds. Strong as the coming of the first child from its mother's womb. It's an earth song. A body song. A spring song. I have been waiting long for this spring song. Today, Easter Sunday morning, a sudden snowstorm swept over the island. Between the greening hedges lay snow. My young son drew me to the little apricot tree by the house wall, away from a verse in which I pointed the finger at those who were preparing a war which could well wipe out the continent, this island, my people, my family, and myself. In silence, we put a stack over the freezing tree. And I should note that the way that this looks on a page is like a tree. Ada Lamon instructions on not giving up. 2018. More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree, more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us. A return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then. I'll take it, the tree seems to say. A new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I'll take it all. Thanks as always to our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put this all together. Class is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media, but the best way to find out what our committee's up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. And if you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. Okay, until next time, Solidarity.