Allen Ginsberg Wrote a Poem for Bernie Sanders and It’s Pretty Great

Sanders for President

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The Guardian‘s Paul Lewis wrote a great profile of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ years as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, including excerpts from Sanders’ correspondence with foreign heads of state, but let’s cut right to the chase: Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem for Bernie Sanders in 1986.

It goes like this:

Socialist snow on the streets

Socialist talk in the Maverick bookstore

Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops

Socialist poetry in socialist mouths

—aren’t the birds frozen socialists?

Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield

Social Democratic Appeasement?

Isn’t the socialist sky owned by

the socialist sun?

Earth itself socialist, forests, rivers, lakes

furry mountains, socialist salt

in oceans?

Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t

belong to me anymore.

I think we know James Franco’s next movie.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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