A poem for Flood Wall Street and the People’s Climate March
September 21-22, 2014

Today
I’m staying
in my pajamas
because I can.

I’m curling
back in bed with
my computer
and checking Facebook,
not one time,
not two times,
but eighteen times
while my children are at school.

I might bake cookies.
I might go back to sleep.
I might type
“Gaza”
and “climate”
into my Google bar and
see how things I care
about connect.
You know—
stretch my mind,
and not my body.

Or
I might sit
on the front step.
Listen to the chainsaws
complain about fire-prone firs,
watch the naked shapes of cardboard
cookies for hard-scrabble birds
dance
on manzanita
in the morning wind…
and then the afternoon wind….

I might wonder when the rain’s coming,
and then begin
to dance
myself,
thinking of the vibrant
hum of humans
rising from New York,
two thousand nine hundred thirteen
miles away.

I think
I’ll imagine
walking with them
today. Because I can.
My mind is built for that—
crossing mountains,
stretching the plain,
until it hums
with possibility.