Saturday poem 1: Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket

by Vachel Lindsay, from General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems (1919)

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.

I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

Man is a curious brute — he pets his fancies —
Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury.
So he will be, tho’ law be clear as crystal,
Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony.

Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.

**

One of the most ancient tasks of poets is to act as seers, visionaries who know without really being able to prove, what the future holds. In Lindsay’s manic sort of way, his flamboyant performances, virtually pure street theater, described by Mike Goldsberry and Tracy Flemming as “a thump, a whistle, and a wheeze of a calliope,” gave American working men and women the courage to see that their hard work and dedication to their own future would result in an earthly paradise just like they had been told when they stood on some foreign shore trying to decide whether to throw it all over for a gamble in the New World.

Lindsay meant the bang of the drum and plunk of the banjo bands to ring out across the New World. With a passion not less than that engendered by religion, Vachel Lindsay sang out his poetry not for the pompous professors of literature, who took him to task for things he did not understand, but for the glory of those Americans who work everyday and sweat hard to create a better world.