BLACK CLOUD SPEAKS

“Our Chief Poetic Justice Warrior walks us through May Day in Flatbush—where the Queen of May, Lovecraft’s horrors, and the secret crack of life all meet under sneers, sneakers, and lilies.”

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*MAYDAY RECONSIDERED

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“Long before the struggle for the eight-hour workday, there were celebrations of the coming of spring in the European world and beyond. When you think about it, the hijacking of this day is really a complete inversion of the original meaning. How could you possibly have more fecundity by working less? (Not accounting, of course, for any so-called ‘gains in productivity.’)

As an ex-altar boy who once participated in the annual May 1st procession of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary around Holy Cross Church in Flatbush, I was always appalled that it was also the day the Red Army chose to parade its latest military hardware. Yet another inversion of the original, life-giving meaning: what was once a feast of flowers became a festival of tanks.

We walked in white shirts and dark slacks, clutching flowers, lifting our voices in hymns. The air was soft and uncertain, smelling faintly of lilacs and bus exhaust. Even now I can remember the feel of the pavement under my shoes, the slow turning of the statue’s platform on the shoulders of older boys and men, the way sunlight seemed to crown her as we turned the corner back toward the church.

The Protestant and Jewish kids—no doubt descendants of Puritans and Reds—would taunt and mock us as they passed by on their way home from Erasmus Hall High School. We carried our garlands; they carried their sneers. But I carried something else too: a strange and stubborn hope, planted quietly by that procession, that some things were worth carrying, worth circling, worth singing around.

Not far from our little parish parade, H.P. Lovecraft had once lived and written, casting his shadow over nearby neighborhoods with stories like The Horror at Red Hook. To Lovecraft, these streets were already portals to eldritch dread, places where ancient, inhuman forces seeped into the cracks of modern life. His vision was cosmic realism—cold, indifferent, vast. And I sometimes wonder if, had he stood quietly and watched our procession pass, he would have seen us as fools—or as brave, doomed innocents.

It feels now like we were walking parallel processions: we circled the church, trailing hymns and lilies; while beneath the city, Lovecraft’s crawling chaos marched toward an abyss that refused even irony. His was a universe of indifferent gulfs; ours was a universe where a woman crowned in flowers still walked among us, carried aloft by trembling shoulders, venerated in hope and mystery.

And now? Now the neighborhood hums with new gods: the gods of chain coffee shops and corporate yoga studios, of absentee landlords and quick-delivery scooters. Neither the Puritans nor the Bolsheviks inherited Flatbush. No one did, really. The neighborhood just kept slipping from one set of strangers to another, until even the meaning of ‘inheritance’ felt like a joke in bad taste.

But the Blessed Virgin? She still lingers in me. Even now, in unexpected moments, I can feel the echo of that procession—a memory like a faint perfume, a warmth behind the ribs, a stubborn intuition that maybe, just maybe, the cosmos wasn’t as cold as they told us.

And even if the procession has faded from the streets, women still give birth; children are still carried; daughters still walk into spring crowned in flowers. The Queen of May still walks, somewhere, in flesh as well as symbol. The potential for fecundity is never wholly extinguished.

I sometimes think of Lovecraft’s dread of the cracks in the city sidewalks—those little fractures he imagined as openings to something monstrous beneath. But maybe what he feared was really something far older, stranger, and more familiar than his nightmares allowed. Maybe those cracks were not gateways to chaos but reminders of a deeper passage: the secret crack through which all of us first entered this world, wet and wailing, carried into light from hidden dark.

Maybe the Queen of May still walks, somewhere, amid the ruins.”

—Black Cloud

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Editor’s note (John St. Evola, M.O.O.): Black Cloud’s recollection reminds us that Flatbush, in its chaotic way, had already become a battlefield of symbolic orders: Blessed Virgin and Red Army, Erasmus Hall and Holy Cross, Maypole and May Day, the cosmic and the ecclesial. And perhaps the land itself remains unconquered, offering its truest inheritance only to those who walk in procession, not in parade.

Poetic Justice Commentary (Filed by the Editor)

The poetic justice of Black Cloud’s recollection lies not in triumph or restoration, but in a mysterious inversion of inversions:

Where the May Day of labor politics sought liberation through class struggle, the old May Day procession honored fecundity, beauty, and maternal intercession. Where Lovecraft’s cosmic realism saw only horror in the teeming multitudes of Flatbush and Red Hook, Black Cloud glimpsed a fragile hope beneath the garlands, a procession circling meaning instead of collapsing into chaos.

And though the neighborhood passed from hand to hand—from the Dutch Calvinists, to Puritan legacies to Bolshevik mockeries and interracial strife to late-capitalist blandness—the memory of the Blessed Virgin’s procession was not eradicated. It lived on in him, quietly, stubbornly, haunting him with hope.

The poetic justice, then, is that amid the parade of mockeries, cosmic horrors, ideological reversals, and urban erasures, the image of a crowned woman—of life, fecundity, and mysterious grace—still lingers in the very man who was taunted, who walked among sneers and prophecies of entropy.

The very street that Lovecraft condemned as a gateway to eldritch horror carried, on its cracked pavement, a fragile yet persistent ritual of reverence.

And so: Black Cloud, who might by rights have inherited bitterness or despair, instead carried something holier, however tenuous—a justice measured not in victory, but in the quiet survival of meaning against all odds.

In the Council’s ledger, this is poetic justice indeed: that the Queen of May still walks amid the ruins, carried not only in memory but in every woman who bears life forward, in every child who crowns her with flowers, and in every secret crack in the world that—despite fear, despite ruin—still opens to let the light in.”

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