No Time for Love

You call it the law, we call it apartheid, internment
Conscription, partition and silence
It’s the law that they make to keep you and me where
They think we belong
The hide behind steel and bullet-proof glass, machine
Guns and spies
And tell us who suffer the tear gas and the torture
That we’re in the wrong
No time for love if they come in the morning
No time to show tears or for fears in the morning
No time for goodbye, no time to ask why
And the sound of the siren’s the cry of the morning
They suffered the torture they rotted in cells, went
Crazy, wrote letters and died
The limits of pain they endured — the loneliness got
Them instead
And the courts gave them justice as justice is given by
Well-mannered thugs
Sometimes they fought for the will to survive but more
Times they just wished they were dead
They took away Sacco, Vanzetti, Connolly and Pearce in
Their time
They came for Newton and Seal, Bobby Sands and some of
His friends
In Boston, Chicago, Saigon, Santiago, Warsaw and
Belfast
And places that never make headlines, the list never
Ends
The boys in blue are only a few of the everyday cops on
The beat
The C.I.D., Branchmen, informers and spies do their
Jobs just as well;
Behind them the men who tap phones, take photos
Program computers and files
And the man who tells them when to come and take you to
Your cell
All of you people who give to your sisters and brothers
The will to fight on
They say you can get used to a war, that doesn’t mean
That the war isn’t on
The fish need the sea to survive, just like your people
Need you
And the death squad can only get through to them if
First they can get through to you