A short poem from Vachel Lindsay

From here.

(no cut because it's short)

Crickets On A Strike

The foolish queen of fairyland
From her milk-white throne in a lily-bell,
Gave command to her cricket-band
To play for her when the dew-drops fell.

But the cold dew spoiled their instruments
And they play for the foolish queen no more.
Instead those sturdy malcontents
Play sharps and flats in my kitchen floor.
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Vachel Lindsay was an itinerant poet, of a populist bent in the Midwestern tradition. He would come into a community and people would put him up and feed him while he wrote poems and declaimed them for the people. He's the author of the little turle song we sing in preschool and also "Factory Windows Are Always Broken."

A little ditty from Mike Quin

Mike Quin was a West Coast communist who wrote for the old Western Worker and People's World newspapers. He was the guy who had to explain why, when the Soviet Union made a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, the war was the capitalists' war and we should stay out of it, and yet, not much long after, the war became the good war and we should all jump in to it. He also wrote detecive fiction (which I have enver had in my hands to read) and some canny editorials and short fiction and poetry that ranges from the simple slogan type like this to longer pieces, some of which are straight-up propaganda and some of which are just funny and some of which really stand up to time.

I'm lazy, so even though I want you to read "Ladies and Lugs" and "The Diaper Brigade, " Mike Quin's stuff isn't largely available in copy-pastable form andI don't want to type out long poems, and therefore I'm giving you this:

If All the Workers

If all the wages were one wage,
What a huge wage that would be!
And if all the factories were one factory,
What a giant factory that would be!
And if all the owners were one owner,
What a useless snob he would be!
And if all the workers were one worker,
What a great worker that would be!
And if the great worker
Let the useless snob
Close the factory
And cut his giant wage,
What a damned fool he would be!