Protest
They showed us on the evening news. Our breath
was visible. So our chants appeared as mere impish
volleys of vapor firing as the camera panned.
But for those moments, believe me, we were beautiful animals.
Have you ever seen, in person, horses lined up and stamping?
We were ranked by the lucent snow banks, our bodies
bridling against the metal gates. We were a timed
explosion of sinew and snap. We became the jagged force
of our convictions: even if underneath the chants we knew
screaming for peace was a fatuous charade, the words
made palpable this feeling of a threshold: this sense that
something must come, some lever catch, some catch release.
*
There are the suppressed and detailed reports. There is
the voice of a captain telling of villagers he befriended.
How he returned to find them kneeling in a line.
How a sergeant from another unit opened fire
in the blank glee of killing. How his superior
held the captain back with his clipped, bureaucratic
“no can do” as the shots and the pleading ripped the air.
Those pages must lie in an archive now: those fibrous
spaces between the type collecting their meager glow.
*
The numbness that comes after the unavailing rage.
The denial spiraling down to dull forgetfulness.
And there’s no release. Only an hour ago when I
caught the outlined family faces in the frames
by the window.... How to explain? How wrench to words?
Outside, the lights of the freeways and the cranes by the water
seemed chained to some netted system that we all
were tangled in. And that system was the war.
My brother’s face on the mantle and my father’s mother’s
portrait from fifty years ago: how tenuous
the links between us felt. But they were everything.
How tenuous my very flesh. My skin felt
wholly taken over by my pulse, and my pulse was
streaming so fast it seemed, if it were cut, the blood
would be impossible to scrub from the floorboards.
