Battle Axe

If I was a battle axe I would be rusty but battle-hardened; perhaps in need of some grinding and polish, but anxious to be wielded against the pitchfork and torch crowd.

Oh, to twirl into battle once again! Would that freedom fighters hurl me toward the massive wooden doors of those gated castles; every plank and nail an obscene gesture to the poor and downtrodden, my every blow a defiant “no” of the have-nots.

The ‘Black Jacobin’ who made art of the abolition of slavery would have had me close at hand when he surfed the powerful Tsunami that was the Haitian Revolution.

To feel the cracked and callused hands of Osawatomie Brown as he cursed with righteous, primordial rage, leaping to his destiny at Harper’s Ferry.

Crazy Horse, who may have been killed, but was never captured; who may have surrendered, but was never defeated, stole me to Little Big Horn as a surprise for a certain Mr. Custer.

Clank! Clank! Up the stairs of the Winter Palace with Lenin and Trotsky as they end the rule of the Czars and their celebrity astrologist, Rasputin and bring–for better and worse–the world’s first socialist state.

The fashion plate Benito Mussolini strung up by anti-fascists at a gas station–oh fitting, ignominious demise! To have tightened those ropes a bit…Could someone have hurled me at the ‘Butcher of Prague’ a bit earlier than 1942?

A Sandinista thrusts me into the road to pry up hexagonal ‘Somoza bricks’ hurling them back at “our son-of-a-bitch.” Later, in 1980 we hunt down the dictator and find him in Paraguay, cowering in his armor plated limousine. A chunk of cobblestone explodes as I make contact with the street, igniting the spark that finishes the job.

I was looking over the shoulder of Edward Teller at Los Alamos–but no-one used me then. Robert J Oppenheimer, mouth agape in horror, held me, but did not use me.

When Madiba made that grim decision to inaugurate Umkhonto we Sizwe I was honored to strike against Apartheid and Coca Cola.

Alas, If I am never to be wielded again, it is an honor to have been swung at all.