Revolutionaries, 1929

Twelve years on, the beard that Lenin wore

Still sharpens revolutionary chins

To dagger-points held ready for the war

In which the outgunned proletarians

Will triumph thanks to these, their generals,

Whose rounded shoulders and round glasses say

That sedentary intellectuals

Raised in the bosom of the bourgeoisie

Can also learn to work — if not with hands,

Then with the liberated consciousness

That shrinks from nothing since it understands

What’s coming has to come. The monuments

To which the future genuflects will bear

These faces, so intelligently stern,

Under whose revolutionary stare

Everything that is burnable must burn.