Make Love
Sept 3 2009


Teenagers with kalashnikovs
make me nervous.
They draft ‘em young, he said.
Hormones and guns, I thought — perfect.
We came armed
with bandannas, water, onions.
Onions?!!
For the tear gas — face covered
by a wet cloth,
breathe-in the onion.
Seriously?, I wondered.
But there I was, looking like all the others
— black hoodie, good runners.

40 years after Woodstock
I think about music, free love
more innocent drugs.
Of course, the adrenaline rush is an upper,
getting high
charging police lines, shouting slogans.
Even half-hearted protests, like mine.
Feeling kind of hopeless,
knowing that we’ll also grow old
get fearful
become accustomed to the status quo.

Before Woodstock
there was King, Gandhi —
bus boycotts,
the unstoppable salt march.
All those long hot summers;
but Jim Crow did eventually end
the British left.
So why not make love
sing folk songs instead?, I mutter;
throat burning
eyes on fire,
running blind.



A pretty obvious poem: about non-violent protest; about civil disobedience. The thing about the onions, by the way, is true. Or so I'm told. (I owe an acknowledgment here to CBC radio's "Dispatches": both for the onion thing, and for the first line (which, I must admit, I took the liberty of "borrowing"!))