At first, I got a little nervous
Where did everybody come from?
I never saw so many people moving together
It could have been the end of the world, or the beginning,
I thought, stepping.
Off the curb and into
the human river.
I moved up beside.
An elderly man with a beard touching his belt,
Handing out scraps of paper with NO written on each one.
Anarchist? I wondered, bracing,
At the weight of the growing crowd coming up
Behind me like a wall of flesh,
I continued on, me, merely an ambulatory cliché,
An American in Paris,
Trying to keep his balance though the maelstrom
Of rage directed against my country’s supreme
court-appointed leader.
Bush’s name everywhere
Was mocked
I looked.
His face, made sillier
By caricature,
Stared down from clowns on stilts;
And infants with the same message pinned on their lapels:
BUSH) ERIE.
Spotting the Stars & Stripes and a placard
American Veterans Against the War
I decided to join my former brothers-in-arms.
As I pushed ahead,
An Arab woman wearing a
kayfiddah,
Appearing holding the American flag
Now I could see
DEATH scribbled again
and again in red letters
Inside the white
spaces of the flag
I once saluted as a marine.
How many are we? I heard someone ask,
Certainly hundreds of thousands of French
Along with dancing
Brazilians,
Chanting Palestinians,
Silent Iraqis.
Even six blonde-haired men holding up a poster reading
ICELANDERS COLD TO
WAR
No trouble. No fights.
No teargas from the police.
I didn’t even hear a
voice raised
Except from the loudspeakers;
Just hundreds of thousands heading
Along the same pathway of desire.
Old, young ,
children, beating out with their feet
What even the deaf ministers in Washington
Must have heard through earplugs of denial
And saw rising from blood-stained checkbooks
NO. WAR FOR OIL.