INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY, OSLO 1978

8. MARCH

they marched in the gray slop
that is the eighth of March
Women's Day in Oslo
bannered red and burning bright
in long street-wide lines

Youngstorget
past the city hall

up Carl Johan
puzzling the grand cafeers
around Kirkeristen
Grensen
the university square

freedom
the signs said
freedom and equality
six hour work days
free nursery schools
Palestine Eritrea Equality
freedom freedom

freedom he read
lesbians he said
all you lesbians need
is a good fuck

even drunk he knew
that women's liberation
had something to do
with his testacles
freedom he said
lesbians

cruddy lousy neckdripping smallsnow

and long long lines
of young all young
women and men
baby-buggies and banners

she cheated
oh lovely
long woman
on crutches
and cut across
Stortoget
with her husband
and child

burning bright

want to buy
some porno
playboy pictures
he said
smart-ass grinning

all he needs

where have you been
Trina said
marching too
you have stars in your hair
it's lovely

yeah

--Conrad Røyksund
March 1978

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

Under the Football Stands

There are times and places when and where the Milky Way really is a milky way; a ragged band of light stretching across the horizon. I still recall--all this time later--catching sight of something much fainter than what you see here--asking my mother what the Milky Way was. I do not recall her precise answer, probably because it was not precise. I am not sure that there were many people--seventy or more years ago--who would have said, plainly, that it was what we see when we look toward the center of our galaxy; that our sun--our star--was one of an uncountable number of stars circling about what is undoubtedly a huge black hole, something like a swarm of bees caught in a cosmic maelstrom. It is to look across the center of a monstrous swarm of stars. It is brighter in that direction, quite naturally. Just as we had to get used to recognizing that our sun was a star, pretty much like most of the other stars we see, we had to remind ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog