Frances Ruhlen McConnel
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Peace March
1
It was the Vietnam War and we were marching for peace.
College kids did that in those days.
Though I wasn’t a kid; I was a grad student
with two little girls at home and a chemist husband.
Nixon had just invaded Cambodia and during
a peaceful demonstration at Kent State,
firing 67 rounds in thirteen seconds,
the National Guard brought down four students.
In Seattle, for two days there were beatings and arrests
as sudden squalls of marching students
stopped traffic on I Five. Now there were fifteen thousand
on the Express Lane the mayor had blocked off for us.
The first warm week of Spring. I was in a loosely knit
pale yellow sleeveless sweater and white
toreador pants with embroidered black vines up the sides
holding tiny leaf-shaped holes where skin showed through.
I marched with a group from the English Department—
grad students and several professors—
we were retracing our steps from the downtown rally
and some were hurrying to get home and others lagging
and I found myself with a group of undergraduate
women in bell bottoms and short-shorts
and an assortment of hippy vests, purchased
at rock festival craft booths or at Nordstrom’s.
They were carrying signs that read Stop the War Machine
and Make Love Not War and Bring the Troops Home
and signs with just the peace symbol on them, like mine,
which was also a symbol of love worn round the neck,
worn by girls and boys alike and even professors with open shirts
where you could see it nestled in their chest hair.
When If I had a hammer came rolling up the ranks,
the young women’s voices swelled beautifully,
though there were addled moments with wash
and back-wash of melody so that even in the same phalanx
you might come in at a discordant place from your neighbor.
2
On the bridge high above Lake Union
where the Express Lane hangs under the main freeway,
sheltered from Whirly Pigs and News copters,
a man in front of us began to take off his clothes.
He was dressed in khaki pants and a plaid shirt
and carried a canvas backpack like the kind
we used to buy at Army/Navy Surplus.
The professors there had beards too and some
were just as nicotine stained, but none as dusty.
He stripped off his shirt and stuffed it and a torn undershirt
into his backpack, then his pants and jockey shorts,
everything but the Army boots and baseball cap.
He kept turning in jagged pirouettes and the girls
around me giggled and shot him quick sparrow peeks.
I noted a nest of dark pubic hair and a pink
and brown flopping cock. Thank God, no erection.
Then the skinny buttocks, the pale backs of his knees.
The girls began to falter or else he sped up and soon
we lost sight of him. But, coming down the ramp, there he was,
hopping on one foot, scrambling into his pants, then veering
off onto a side street, glancing around for cops.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, came a gush of rain
and it went right through my summer things.
I had found my friends again and one of the profs
invited us to his office to warm up on wine
left over from some post-lecture reception.
I was the only woman there and I was bra-less,
it being 1970. The light sweater was drying fast,
but it chilled me in the process. The front
was covered with little nubs and all of them
weren’t the sweater’s. The men toasted an end to the war;
then they toasted me with their various mugs where
little brown bits of dried coffee swam in the pale sherry.
We were pleased with ourselves that day. We felt splendid,
reckless, almost reborn. Jack used the phrase “natural high”
and Ben: “eye-opener.” He might have meant Youth Roused to Action,
but since he was looking at me when he spoke,
I blushed prettily, as ladies do in novels.
Then a couple of grad students began to talk of the troubles
they were having with their dissertations.
3
I don’t mean to make fun of us, though there’s that.
But we helped get the war over with, didn’t we?
Though wars seem to just pile up anyway,
one behind the other, like breakers waiting to come ashore.
I look around now and young women are coming to class
with bare strips of belly showing off navel rings,
their arms and shoulders tough with muscle and tattoo,
and I doubt a swinging pecker in a crowd is going to faze them.
Most of the boys and young men I know are playing
at War, only it seems to involve broad swords and battle axes.
But my grandson says it’s an education in strategy, cooperation,
making order out of chaos. Some of the characters are Healers,
he adds, not Destroyers. Well, okay, let us embrace your Healers.
Lads, unplug yourselves from the sacred flame of the monitor;
lasses, break out of your migratory grazing through malls--
I’m not saying things aren’t scarier now and complicated
almost beyond imagination, or that we couldn’t all use
a cozy dose of fantasy--but bring your pleasures along
and here we’ll come with our pathetic hedonistic egos
and our new Nikes with air soles, because a ruckus
is needed when Doom is no longer just a word
on a cartoon fanatic’s sign in The New Yorker
and it can’t be just us old-timers feeling
Time ticking ever faster toward the end.
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Frances Ruhlen McConnel is retired from teaching in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. She is co-chair the committee that runs the Claremont Library Poetry Reading Series: Fourth Sundays, which is a great pleasure. Her last book, The Direction of Longing, is still available and you can find other poems of mine if you google me. She has recently appeared in the print journals miramar, Solo Novo, and The Southern California 2015 Haiku Anthology apology of wildflowers.