The Shovel Rights Knock Knock Joke
by MARC BEAUDIN
for Mike Cloud Devine
“We defend the right of the shovel to not dig its own grave.”
–Mike Cloud Devine
We hold this truth to be self-evident:
That we are endowed by the Universal and Cosmic Dance of Creation,
by the Eternal song on the lips of the Mother of all that’s green except money,
by Odin who hung himself from the World Tree to wrench the Runes from the hands of the Nameless & bring us poetry,
by the simple fact of our existence,
we are endowed with certain unalienable rights
that among these are Life, Liberty & the pursuit of not Happiness, but True Bliss
& more than that–
We have the right to a star-filled night sky,
a sunset unscarred by smog & contrails,
& a horizon free of smokestacks, reactors and radio towers
We have the right to mud between our toes,
snowflakes on our tongues,
& Spring-drunk air in our lungs
We have the right to our rivers & aquifers
free of pipelines,
our minds free of corpraganda,
& our airwaves free of hate
We have the right to dance awkwardly, to sing out of tune,
to make fools of ourselves & be politically obscure,
to think globally & act up,
to make a mockery of all that is holy,
& to hold sacred the most ridiculous forms of tomfooleric shenanigans
We have the right to use words like “tomfooleric” in our poems
We have the right to work or not work,
to do work that does not turn us into robots
or zombies or products or hazardous waste sites
To do work that brings beauty & comfort & pride & illumination
& to stop work anytime the streets need the vote of our bodies & voices
We have the right to our shovels,
to use them to dig potatoes, firepits or graves for tyrants
to build sand castles where no king is welcome
to bang them together & call it music,
to lay them down and call it a strike,
to raise them up & call it revolution,
to drive them into the ground & call it
“Knock, Knock?”
“Who’s there?”
“Chickens.”
“Chickens who?”
“Chickens coming home to roost.”
Marc Beaudin is the author of The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and co-owner of Elk River Books in Livingston, Montana. He can be reached at crowvoice.com.
Editorial Note: (Please Read Closely Before Submitting)
To submit to Poets’ Basement, send an e-mail to CounterPunch’s poetry editor, Marc Beaudin at counterpunchpoetry@gmail.com with your name, the titles being submitted, and your website url or e-mail address (if you’d like this to appear with your work). Also indicate whether or not your poems have been previously published and where. For translations, include poem in original language and documentation of granted reprint/translation rights. Attach up to 5 poems and a short bio, written in 3rd person, as a single Word Document (.doc or .rtf attachments only; no .docx – use “Save As” to change docx or odt files to “.doc”). Expect a response within one month (occasionally longer during periods of heavy submissions).
Poems accepted for online publication will be considered for possible inclusion of an upcoming print anthology.
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