by Jan Steckel
A blazing stateroom of clapping blondes.
The President dropped the match. The windows
blew out like a thousand Kristallnachts.
My husband slept through the little Hiroshima.
In the morning we’d have to pour into the streets.
I tried to curl up like the cat and snooze.
But voices whispered, “Anyone can march.
Take up your pen. Write an anthem we can
sing again.” Dead poets filled my bedroom.
Victor Jara lifted broken hands.
García Lorca slid down a bullet-riddled wall.
Mandelstam starved and shivered in a transit camp.
My dead friend, Berkeley poet Julia Vinograd,
read new poems in my dream, turned to me.
“Open your mouth,” she said. So hear me:
Tomorrow some will march, some write,
and others sing. Though glass and bone shatter,
America will never bear another king.