to reach the limits of ourselves

I went to see Cradle Will Rock at Classic Stage Company tonight (the first of three shows I am seeing this week). It was an amazing production, but I totally didn't realize how well I still knew the show from my obsession with the 1999 movie and the Patti Lupone recording of the musical (I know it...really well?!). Anyway, there are a shortage of poems about unions and labor organizing and the Federal Theatre Project. But I've been sitting on this poem since the beginning of the month, and although it's not directly related, it seems appropriate to me, in a sort of two-steps-sideways kind of way. 

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

—Muriel Rukeyser, "Poem" from The Speed of Darkness, 1968. With thanks to N., who brought this poem to my attention.