“The day will come when our silence
will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” – August Spies, from the gallows
Here half hangs August Spies*
trying to make out
the unclear sounds
buzzing in his ears
in that Chicago square
as he swings surrounded
by the other three unrepentant
fruits of Labor & Anarchy
In his inner eye receding
from his pupil
a flash of image and sound
not his personal past
but a smoldering magmatic flow
Chaos and smoke
Storms and fire
Tunnels and the smell of phosphorous
A city named Odessa and sailors
Odessa and flying machines
A gigantic steelworks the likes of which
he had never seen
And tunnels and hundreds of people
A painting with desperate horses
A jungle and a peasant with a straw hat and a rifle
People in a rainforest with bandana covered face and guns
Were they merely shards
of a Pandora’s vase
exploding with rage?
Could those clay and flesh fragments
be future-dated with a sniff
of newly crowding senses?
When had the winds forced their way
out of that tight lid
and let loose its dread?
His last glimmer of consciousness
brought a sensation of shattering
and then a merging
in a substance unknown
a feeling of being on the other side
of things
as the rope
loped and tightened
sparking awake
a dormant sense
in the rib
between sight and hearing
potent and sharp
cutting through language
and the crumbling
edifice of Babel
cutting through deed
cutting through illusion
cutting through need
But then the rope cut deep
And August the immigrant
August the anarchist
August the press man
He of the golden tongue
Spread his wings
At the falling of
his personal dusk
his bones feeling
the merging and emerging
the ecstasy and the dread.
- August Vincent Theodore Spies (Germany 1855 – Chicago 1887), upholsterer, radical labor activist, anarchist and newspaper editor. Framed for an alleged conspiracy following the Haymarket riot, he was executed on November 11, 1887. May First was selected to celebrate International Workers’ Day to commemorate the Haymarket riots for the eight hour work day.
