Seattle, October 27, 2007

Crisp cold autumn sunshine
Bright colored banners waving
Pre-march tentativeness
Looking for a place to stand
Socialism, nonviolence, Quakers and Code Pink
Anarchists, union activists, hip-hop and new folk
Multiple identities united in opposition
To yet another illegal, immoral war
A long-haired, sandaled young man with a coffin strapped to his back
A giant paper mache Muslim woman carrying a child
Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld
In prison garb and chains
Captialism puppet with money and gun
Battling with the International Court
Dogs carrying peace signs
Tear-gas stained berets
Iraq veterans and their families to the front
7000 falling into formation without supervision
Walking through neighborhoods far from the centers of power
Signs in Vietnamese, so many small businesses
Generated from that other war
The one we marched against thirty-eighty years ago
Is this country capable of a pacific existence?
Bemused Asian faces on the side of the road
Seem to say they doubt it
Another roadside spectator
Heckler from the 1950s
Bush’s drinking buddy
Equating antiwar with communism
The response from young students is deadly serious:
“SDS is back!”
Adding new chants to the old standards
Creating the echo of exhilaration
Under the elevated freeway
And when we gather at the end
Iraq vets, Iranian peaceniks, Latina immigrants
The graying union rep, the young political hip-hop band
A memory of hope remains.