A poem for his friend and comrade.

‘John Reed’ by Arturo Giovannitti from New Masses. Vol. 2 No. 6. April, 1927.

What difference does it make
Whether a few bricks have fallen off the Coliseum
Or another bolt has chipped the brow of the Jungfrau?
What difference does it make whether you are alive or dead,
So long as you stand like these, Jack?

Yesterday we were drinking wine together and cracking nuts with our teeth
You and Billy Chatoff and Bob Minor and Max and Bill Haywood and I;
Today—or is it tonight? — you are playing cards and testing the edge of newly forged blades
With Benvenuto and Cirano and Salvator Rosa,
While Francois Villon is filling the glasses, wishing hard that you would ask him to read his new Ballade des Copains du Beau Temps Jadis.
You are all right, Jack, wherever you are, with a steady and and goodly company,
And we are gladder and stronger because you went away so splendidly.
There will be hardier seeds and mightier metals in the soil of Russia
Now that you are there.

Arturo Giovannitti

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1927/v02n06-apr-1927-New-Masses.pdf