Heather Spears
On Not Writing a Protest Poem
I think I have lain down among their voices
it is as if the continent, or its map, were drawn or sewn
quilt soft it’s the way landscape gets
after a first snow and its detail
moves, or whispers, and has become a vast yard
of the living and all of them speaking
badly in unison, different words for the same despair.
What has to be said is so small, small as a stone
and not difficult, not demanding
not like an orchestra or any electric host
heavenly or otherwise
its taste is peculiar and intimate the way a leaf
tastes of lemons or the watery sea
of bits of salt, you can’t eradicate it.
So if I lie down
among the others and cease to strive
I can allow them - what they are saying
lifts like a smoke, disperses, this history
on the brinks of history, this innumerable solitary
personal worrying crime of becoming
good, when it is too easy to be good, these days
when God exacts the opposite, and the meek world protests,
like a patient being turned in bed.
Page(s) 246-247
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