Meridel Le Sueur > Quotes

“The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.”
― Meridel Le Sueur

“I hope you will be a warrior and fierce for change so all can live.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980

“The people are a story that never ends,
A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, North Star Country

“Survival is a form of resistance.”
― Meridel Le Sueur

“It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980

“He will lift up the limp bodies of the rabbits and show me how he caught them square between the eyes, and the bright bodies of male and female pheasants with shot in the breast and their necks hanging broken and their eyes half open in the voluptuous death he loves. He will be a knife leaning above me as he kisses me.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Harvest

“I saw the bodies bearing the mark of their oppression, of their stolen labor, and now their holy dead. Their bodies were hieroglyphs of their exploitation, their blood and bodies taken, their lungs turned to silica stone.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Crusaders: The Radical Legacy of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur

“The only knowledge now is the knowledge of the dispossessed. Our Earth itself screams like a bandaged, roaring giant about to rise in all its wounds
and bear upon the conqueror.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980

“DOAN KET*

(...)We also live in a captive country, in the belly of the shark.
The horrible faces of our predators, gloating, leering,
the bloody Ford and Rockefeller and Kissinger
presiding over
the violation of Asia.


*Doan Ket' means 'solidarity' in Vietnamese.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980

“There are no quiet dead—and no quiet deed.
Everything you touch now is ticking to its explosion.
The scab is about to infect.
The ruined land is dynamite. Cadmus teeth of dead
guerillas gnaw the air. Nature returns all wounds
as warriors.
The Earth plans resistance and cries: Live!”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980

“Amidst the ruins we shine forth, in holy mutual
cry, revealing the plainest cruelties and human equation,
the deprivations of power, the strength of numbers,
and endurance, and the holy light from the immortal wound.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980