Garments
I’d been reading about Allison Krause, the victim of the Kent State Massacre, and also about the Tiananmen Square Protests for a project. The following is a poem that I was compelled to write as a way of attempting to exorcise my feelings about the two events. I’ve stripped it down and rewritten it recently, and I suspect I probably will again at some point, but in the meantime, here it is in its current incarnation:
By the time the guards arrived, we’d tied
the banners to the razor-wire, a set of
knitted baby booties – pink, and torn
across a rusting crown of thorns;
and even though we knew the guns
were just for show, still the panic boiled,
bright and lucid in our blood; our breaths
were skipping beats – a riotous, twitching
poem of exhalation; holding hands, our
interlocking fingers, knuckles: half-blood
ligatures in a knotted rope, stretching
the full length of the perimeter;
A clothesline of arms,
thin garments of our bodies,
hanging down;
To my left, my friend in the blue-check
linen shirt, singing defiance softly to himself;
To my right, the girl in the sunflower dress,
billowing – a freedom sail around her knees;
Look at us, we said – What are we?
No threat, but just the threadbare fabric
of a worn humanity: as ordinary,
as inoffensive, as laundry…
They, dressed
in the pressed creases,
of a gunmetal grey,
single-minded
as the wind,
looked
straight though us;
blew us
all
away.
