Revolution

We are the Workers and Peasants Red Army,
victorious in the smoky lunacy of 1949.

We shoved those kissers of Imperialist ass off onto their island,
where they may kindly sip tea and go to hell.

Of course, we don't believe in it.
Hell, I mean,
even though we have just slogged straight through it,
men and women together,
blowing our enemies' brains out, hoo rah.

For a while, we had to join forces with them,
because we both hated the Japanese more.
The Flying Tigers came up from Burma and helped us;
each plane with a mercenary white man crammed into its cockpit.

Enough of that.

Now we have kicked tail and this whole smouldering shit pile is ours.
My love and I, both wearing military uniforms and our revolutionary caps,
wandered in a dull moment through the ruins of a museum.

We held hands, rifles slung across our backs.

Miraculously, we found one perfect unbroken vase,
and we turned it in to our commander.
He probably swapped it for cigarettes or sex,
but we did the right thing, we honored our ancestors
and then went back to shoving our bayonets into people's bellies.

In a stolen moment, my love said to me,
"I always think of them as babies.
I think how they had mothers; that someone loved them
and had hopes for them."
Here are your hopes, the glorious Red Army.

I spoke gently in my love's ear.
I said, "Don't. You'll lose your mind, thinking that way."

We have blown limbs and heads off,
all in order to establish a perfect Communist state.
Now, order.
Now, equality.
Now, a great China united in accomplishment and nobility of purpose.

My love is the most beautiful emblem of Chinese womanhood.
Me, I'm the girl who found the vase, and turned it in to our commander,
but we don't tell him, or anyone else, about ourselves and our passion.

There is a limit to the Communist ideal,
run as it is by men who began as farmers and ditch diggers,
and that limit is found hidden in the nerves at the tips and every touch
of our fingers.
______

for Hannah's challenge at Real Toads