Inspiration

Poem for an Activist Who Doubts Herself
by Dani Montgomery

We're standing on the curb smoking
and you raise your face to the sky
wanting to know why couldn't i have been around back
in the seventies?
you read books about struggle and feel small
you walk along fillmore in the february wind
while cops circle the block again and again
wondering how come
in a time when so many grow up
and go out
without even the hope
of enough
why when we need a movement
more than ever

there's less and less talk of revolution?

and like you said
we need more than a job center
a drop in clinic
more than a free meal
more than a few lives saved.
we need more than this block
more than this city
more than five hundred
or five thousand marching.

but we're two
and upstairs in the office there's three more
cutting flyers and making phone calls
and at the senior center down the street
we could find six or seven
been sitting alone in their rooms
without enough cash for taxi fare
and on the bus
i know we could get eight, nine, ten
out of work
riding up and down town all day
filling out forms in the hope of a bed tonight and
there's number eleven
counting out rolls of pennies in safeway
yesterday in juvie i met twelve through twenty
armed with pencils
and they have mothers and lovers and brothers and friends
who have a niece and a godson and a downstairs neighbor
and we'll get to enough
We'll be the light on our granddaughter's faces
when they pierce the sky with victory.