You posed the Southern Question

while waging war in the trenches

of bourgeoisie fantasy.

You drank languages & histories.
Mussolini drank your blood.

Unswayed by victory,

you refused to genuflect before teleology.

Breaking with Hegel–surpassing Croce–
you made prose into poetry.

Fragile wrists pouring over notebooks

in a staccato more rigid

than the bars of your cell.
You are the particles of shivering light,

on the crossbars of your smoky windowpanes.

Recipient of deposits made by history

without the benefit of an inventory.
The task, you said, is to make that inventory.

You are the politics your body rejected.

Optimism of the will,

pessimism of the intellect.
You are eyes-wide-open despair,

hope plus seeing, will plus being.

Vico’s son, made by history

the “we” born into poetry.
You are the name on the lips

of every freedom hungry soul.

Agitator of peasant visionaries,

mobilizer of dreams forged in factories,
democratizer of beauty, leading

the Communist Party

to question reality.

For the US Senator testifying
to the House Ways & Means Committee,

you are an agitator

for the destruction

of Western democracy.
The jottings your sister-in-law

removed from your prison cell quietly,

the unpublished masterpiece

that will merge with eternity.
Family torn from your arms,

your wife removed in Russia,

your son seen once in the airport

before he vanished from your horizon.
You directed his education

from your prison cell,

Gramsci, whose mother

considered her son
the state’s enemy number one

Anti-utopian of universal equality,

theorizer of the new society,

you are no martyr, Gramsci,
just an organizer

accelerating

the revolution

rooted in reality.