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Greasing the Maypole 
Mayday 2001

Come workers, come witches
Come socialists, come elves
Come wizards, come peasants
and break your sleepy spells

Yes! Arise ye from your covens and squats and slumbers
in unvanquishable numbers
and greet the May morn

Come communists, come shamen
High priestesses and worker priests
Come alchemists and anarchists
and join in May Day’s feast

Hecate call Emma Goldman
Vanzetti call on Pan
Woman call Woman
Man call Man

Ye Haymarket martyrs
and oak-rooted satyrs
Ye rank and file goddesses
and divine shop stewardesses
Come marry your colours and dreams

Let red and black fly from the green Maypole heights
Let riots of wild flowers spread like wildcat strikes

Yes, come all ye Wiccan-syndicalists and eco-agitators
Ye anti-fascist faeries and allotment propagators
Plant those Beltane barricades of hawthorn and yew
and in the seasoned pagan cauldron cook an anarchist stew

Come all ye soviet astrologers and pantheistic punks
Ye cannabis conspirators and anarcho-Bacchanalian drunks
Come all ye pacifist pixies and direct action druids
Celebrate your fluid bodies and all your bodily fluids

Come ye all
and let whatever is
tight
in your ideology or psychology or theology or pantheology
be gently loosened by the rhythms of the earth

for a pleasure to one is a pleasure to all

Yes! Down with the bosses and up with the sun
Phone in well
and clock in for fun
“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution,” the fiery Emma said
and the cleverest cops are often those ones patrolling inside our heads

So raise your embroidered banners and drop your underwear
and show your arses to the ruling classes and have no care
for tomorrow
for Mother Earth will carry you
and knows a thing or two or three about revolutions

Yes, come workers and come witches
Come revolutionaries, come elves
Come anti-warlocks and anti-warriors
and snap out of your sleepy spells

Oh, arise ye from your covens and squats and permaculture plots
in unvanquishable
and deliciously banquetable numbers
and greet the fair, sweet, flowering
and horny May morn



Picture
   © Stephen Hancock 2023                                                                                                                                                                Energy is Eternal Delight