Protest

I’m standing on the corner at the one light
in town with a band of boomers like in’70:
No blood for oil. Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam.
Except now what hair we have is gray or dyed,
showing even we are surrendering to time.
Some of the younger ones wield babies—
sure-fire arms for claiming the high ground.
One guy’s stuffed himself into his old
Army field jacket: another veteran for peace.
But the folks across the street chanting
support our troops don’t get his point.
And in case we don’t get theirs, our mayor
crosses over to parade his bass drum belly
and waving flag before us.

My son died for you guys,
one woman screams
from her car window.
I want to stop her, sit her down,
tell her my son is out there somewhere
in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Jordan.
He can’t tell me. But now it’s me
behind the wheel, anger pressing
hard on my heart’s accelerator,
and my son is never coming back.
If I had a gun, I’d shoot right through
their signs and hope to God a few
of them went down. When I screech
into my driveway, I lay my head down
on the wheel, let sobbing take my body.

Then I’m back, holding a sign
as subtle as a sawed-off shotgun.
When the words I need to explain
my standing here to her are too many
and too quiet to appear on any sign.
Words that hold no weapons,
wear no armor. Or they’re written
on the side I’m staring into—
the blank side, the side that listens.

Judith Sornberger

On the Edge of the Garden

One daughter says
her son was conceived
when her family bus,
painted with balloons,
stalled in a piney forest
on Grand Canyon’s north rim.
I’m just as sure she happened
with my single trial
of the rhythm method.

Another daughter is convinced
her daughter came into being
at our lakeside cabin.
I believe, years before,
my son did too,
when moonlight bled through
the chinks in the shingles.

Like an astronaut on the surface
of the moon, a sperm
jumps into the egg,
an event so momentous it sets off
bells and cheers. How else
could a woman be so sure?

Even my mother
told me she moved with Dad
into a tent one summer
on the edge of the garden.
There, away from Grandpa
and his nightmares,
amid pease blossoms
and corn tassels,
they began my life.

Virginia Corrie-Cozart

Copyright  2006 by CALYX, Inc., a non-profit corporation. No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced without written permission from CALYX.