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Zack de la Rocha Pens Poem For Occupy Wall Street

by Michael Depland, N.Y.  |   November 16, 2011 5:00 EST
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Artists in this Article

Rage Against the Machine
Zack de la Rocha

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Zack de la Rocha is rarely silent on social and political issues, be it in his activism or his music with Rage Against The Machine and One Day As A Lion. Following the government evacuation of New York's Zuccotti Park (the site of Occupy Wall Street) on Nov. 15, de la Rocha once again merged his two passions with a poem pledging his support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

 

Occupy Wall Street: When Music Stars Invade

 

"This poem is dedicated to the Occupy movement whose courage is changing the world. Stay Strong. We are winning," he said in a statement accompanying the poem.

 

The beginning spills through city veins
Into the arteries
And under powers poison clouds
We move like the shadows
Through the alley ways
Through nightmares bought and sold as dreams
Through barren factories
Through boarded schools
Through rotting fields
Through the burning doors of the past
Through imaginations exploding
To break the curfews in our minds

 

Our actions awaken dreams of actions multiplied
A restless fury
Once buried like burning embers
Left alone to smolder
But together stacked under the walls of a dying order
All sparks are counted
Calloused hands raised in silence
Over the bonfire of hope unincorporated
It's flame restores tomorrows meaning
Across the graveyards of hollow promises
As gold dipped vultures pick at what is left of our denial

 

And the youngest among us
Stare at us stoned like eyes determined
And say
Death for us may come early
Cause dignity has no price
At the corner of now and nowhere
Anywhere
Everywhere
Tomorrow is calling
Tomorrow is calling
Do not be afraid

 

-- Zack de la Rocha

 

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