TRIBUTE TO THE NOVEMBER REVOLUTION

Left March

For the Red Marines: 1918

[ Liberation pays tribute to the November Revolution, with a poem by the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky witnessed the Revolution in Petrograd, and he wrote Left March , which he used to recite at naval theatres with sailors for an audience.]

Rally the ranks into a march!
Now's no time to quibble or browse there.
Silence, you orators!
You
have the floor,
Comrade Mauser.
Enough of living by laws
that Adam and Eve have left.
Hustle old history's horse.
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

Ahoy, blue jackets!
Cross the sky-moats!
Beyond the oceans!
Unless
your battleships on the roads
blunted their keels' fighting keenness!
Baring the teeth of his crown,
let
the lion of Britain whine, gale-heft.
The commune can never go down.
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

There-
beyond sorrow's peaks,
sunlit lands uncharted.
Against hunger,
against plague's dark seas,
the marching of millions has started!
Let armies of hirelings ambush us,
streaming cold steel through every rift, -
L'Entente can't conquer the Russians,
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

Does the eye of the eagle fade?
Shall we stare back to the old?
Proletarian fingers
the throat of the world
still tighter hold!
Chests out!
Shoulders straight!
Stick to the sky red flags adrift!
Whose marching there with the right?!!
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!