Eight years and seven lives for a plank and the May Day story

One afternoon in 1945, says Pablo Neruda in his autobiography, he spoke to the laborers in a machine shop in the offices of the María Elena potassium-nitrate mine. The floor of the huge workshop was, as always slushy with water, oil, and acids. The union leaders and Neruda walked on a plank that kept them off the mire.


“These planks,” Neruda was told, “cost us fifteen strikes in a row, eight years of petitioning, and seven dead.”


The deaths occurred when the company’s private police carried off seven leaders during a strike. The guards rode horses, while the workers, bound with ropes, followed on foot over the lonely stretches of sand. It took only a few shots to murder them. Their bodies, learnt Neruda, were left lying in the desert sun and cold, until they were picked up and buried by their fellow workers....

It's a day past May Day and this is one of the times when you have to look back, wipe off the dust that settles on your spectacles, and the grime that sticks to it and makes the world around look like a shadow pantomime... it’s May Day once again, come and gone, and I get a day off from work, like countless others, throughout the globe...



A commonality, a solidarity? Nah, things and people are forgotten fast.

But sometimes their stories and their dreams do survive...

And some words float in from the past, if you haven't forgotten all about it already, or in case you never heard the words shouted by August Spies on November 11, 1887, as the gallows floor dropped:

"The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."



Dreams of a far-off country, from another century, seems to fill the silence of the present...and I wish it fills this this blue-green inverted void compounded of many simples and complexes...

Our silences?