Garments
I’ve been reading recently about Allison Krause, the victim of the Kent State Massacre, and about the Tiananmen Square Protests
for another project, and I wrote the following little poem of the back of that…
We’d already finished tying
all the banners to the razor-wire,
when the guards arrived – and yes,
they were all armed – and yes,
although we could not quite believe
that they would use them, still the panic
boiled, bright and lucid, in our blood;
our breaths were skipping beats -
a riotous, twitching poetry of exhalation,
and we were clenching each other’s hands
and pulling tight – our interlocking fingers,
half blood ligatures in a knotted rope
that ran the length of the perimeter:
a clothesline of arms,
the cotton-soft garments
of our bodies, hanging down:
to my right, my friend, in his blue-check
linen shirt, singing his defiance, quietly
to himself; to my left, the woman
whose sunflower-print dress billowed
like a sail, around her knees:
Look at us, we were saying,
Look at us – all we are, is
the warm, worn fabric
of dog-eared humanity:
as unthreatening, as ordinary,
as inoffensive
as laundry…
and they,
dressed
in the pressed
creases of
a gunmetal grey;
as single-minded
as the wind; looked
straight though us;
blew us
all
away.
