Revolutionaries, 1929
Twelve years on, the beard that Lenin wore
Still sharpens revolutionary chins
To dagger-points held ready for the war
In which the outgunned proletarians
Will triumph thanks to these, their generals,
Whose rounded shoulders and round glasses say
That sedentary intellectuals
Raised in the bosom of the bourgeoisie
Can also learn to work — if not with hands,
Then with the liberated consciousness
That shrinks from nothing since it understands
What’s coming has to come. The monuments
To which the future genuflects will bear
These faces, so intelligently stern,
Under whose revolutionary stare
Everything that is burnable must burn.
.
.
by Adam Kirsch
from Poetry, April, 2013