Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Daniel Rose
32 years old
Washington, DC
Writer and school administrator. Native Washingtonian. MA in English from the University of Texas.
A First Protest
Often we have come here for frisbee. On the greenswards of the Mall folded sweathsirts marked our base baths, our ends zones, the goals between which we dashed. This has been our privilege – to run at dusk by the monuments, the museums: the Capitol itself made a solemn mile marker and the pebbles of the Mall cushioned with a pleasant crunch the footfalls of our Nikes.
But what is this now? What has this hill sprouted? Who are these legions with signs? Why do we stand where mud is? Why are so many cheeks and noses changing to red in the flat cold sun? We are only one side of the hill. We have only a partial vantage. But look, we are vibrant and many. Parti-colored, multi-hued, motley slews of folk crowding into the trees and lining now the willowed banks of this still pond by Constitution Ave.
No, this is not what was intended. This is not what meets our tastes. We were the tenth, silent Brady. We were ghosts in Beaver’s house. The world was over when we got here. Yet it was promised us: a virtual world stimulating, quick, clickable: we might photoshop a nose ring on Mona Lisa, or find investors for our javascript animations. It was given us: to watch Nickelodeon to laugh at Scooby Doo to dive into the mosh pit to quote the Book of Seinfeld to quote the book of Simpson. Bring it back, bring it back: the Bronco rolling down the freeway the shootings at the high school the famous thong, the famous stain the shark attacks, the intern in the park: we will speak to you in focus groups we will tell you our opinions and tolerate the contrary view: but listen to this radical now from the stage obscured by signs he says, yadda yadda justice he says, yadda yadda oil I want to sit on the flat wet grass. I want to go on home and watch t.v.
Yet here we are beneath the leaves on Constitution, shuffling in rows with strangers, beneath the dopplering beat and drone of helicopers. The march turns left into the open, into the sunlight, into the broad familiar street that passes the Elipse, the Corcoran, the shining dimpled tin of vendor carts. The column stretches on beyond our view. And now the chant begins, a mighty single chant spreading through the vast column in throes and fits. This is now our business, to join the chant to let it come, like a hiccup at first, like a retch -- until the mighty vast single mass voice pours hoarsely from our throats: for Rather will not tell you Jennings, Lehrer, Brokaw, Russert will not tell you, nor direct your gaze to the bulldozers filling in the trenches the babies without faces the soldiers without faces the flesh in the fireball the slugs ripping through the plaster the angled limbs of the piled dead. So it falls on me to tell you: that one October afternoon after Wellstone’s crash ten times ten thousand throats threw syllables slowly into air: Peace. Now.
