Colm MacCárthaigh: Vocal and Guitar,  Matt Jerrell: Drums, Ryan Davidson: Double Bass.

Lyrics:

This old heart hears
the Poet’s Call
And it’s screaming at the wall
These old eyes see
a restless city
Drums are beating in the dark

And you were there
in Zuccotti Square
Singing out the echoes of a nation
Saying we need
to work for change
We need an Occupation

These old hands will hold
you from cold
We’ll dream the night away
These old feet will dream
of a gentle stream
Euphrates by the bay

And you were there
with your blue-green hair
Singing out the echoes of a nation
Saying we need
to work for change
We need an Occupation

And you and me we will walk the sea
We will our lives in a fantasy
But here tonight we’ll just drink this wine
We’ll sit here talking about Zinn and Klein

This old heart hears
the Poet’s Call
And it’s screaming at the wall
These old eyes see
a restless city
Drums are beating in the dark

And you were there
in Zuccotti Square
Singing out the echoes of a nation
Saying we need
to work for change
We need an Occupation

Notes about Occupation

Back in October 2011 I happened to be spending a few days in New York City. At the time Occupy Wall St. was occupying Zuccotti Park, not too far from Wall St. itself, and I decided that would be a much better place to spend a night than the weird hotel I was staying in Midtown. I’d been to plenty of peace marches and protests in Ireland. Massive peace marches saying “not in our name” through Dublin every time some branch of the IRA sprung up and committed another atrocious act in too long a series. A protest outside the department of Education too demand a (long promised) school building for our fledgling school, a protest against a bank closing in our working class community. These all had a familiar script.

Occupy Wall St. was different; protesters had been protesting for about a week by the time I got there and were very committed. This was an occupation after all. Early on they had marched on Wall St. but been corralled back into Zuccotti Park. Their core point was simple: the richest 1% are stiffing the 99% of society. Back then this was radical. That this is now a mainstream understanding, made more institutional by the likes of Piketti, is in large part due to the efforts of Occupy.

A sign of how radical and seemingly dangerous this simple point was is that the Occupiers were surrounded by police and denied any amplification equipment. A sort of anarchic leaderless commune emerged as the core, with a make-shift series of stages for speeches. The crowd would surround whoever was talking, who would say a line only to have it repeated by the crowd. It was a very effective amplification system, though also very church-like in tone.

I had a good night talking to people. An NYU student told me about Jo Freeman’s great essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. A group who’d come in from Philadelphia talked to me about Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein. The whole while, big homemade drums were beating, like a heartbeat for the square. A few years later I wrote this song. I’ve tried to work in those memories and the feel of it. The song began with one vivid moment. As he was walking by, one police officer shouted “Get a Job” to no-one in particular. The irony of that struck me. A crowd saying “What we need is an occupation”, and an officer saying, “What you need is an occupation”. Too often in modern times, people have completely opposite understandings of the same words and facts, right in front of them.