Nancy Wakeman and Barbara Ann Firger
Nancy Wakeman has lived in San Francisco for thirty years and writes poetry and prose for people of all ages. Some of her work has been published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Tricycl: The Buddhist Review and the Hollins Critic.
Her biography for young people, Babe Didrikson Zaharias: Driven to Win appeared in 2000.
Singing For Peace
The train screeches, rocks on its tracks. I sit knee to knee with a
modem Madam Defarge who knits peppermint green wool - a
belt, a border for an afghan? We speed through a tunnel under the
bay. Shooting from the best of times for some - fast money, five
star Beaujolais flowing from fountains, houses with a room for
every week of the year - speeding into the worst of times. The
government pounds drums of fear, tells us we have to invade
Iraq, depose Sadam Hussein who hides “weapons of mass
destruction”; while Oakland claims the highest homicide rate in
the country and children in Michigan and Colorado carry guns to
school and kill their classmates.
In the dark tunnel the window becomes a mirror reflecting the
crowded subway car. We all sit with eyes lowered, reading,
knitting, dozing. To look directly at someone is to invade '
that person's space, to invite unwanted glances. Our brave
president chomps at the bit of democracy, ready to invade to
avenge the threats on his daddy's life, to insure a steady supply of
oil for our giant cars.
I am on my way to El Cerrito del Norte BART Station to join
others and sing for peace. The train surfaces in Oakland speeds
above parking lots full of cranes, truck trailers and a five o'clock
sky so vast, still blue above that San Francisco with Twin Peaks
and the Transamerica Pyramid becomes a small silhouette as the
sun sinks behind gray clouds.
The train speeds on through Berkeley. Madame Defarge keeps
knitting. The sun continues to cast off stitches that melt into long
strands of orange and crimson. Even the bay shrinks under the
expanse of sky. We rush by houses, small square boxes shoved
together between ocean and hills, freeways and train tracks.
Postage stamp yards fenced with rules and expectations.
Above us the deep vastness of the sky invites us to stretch the
muscle of our imagination. How small our lives; this devotion to
war and “us over them”.
The train reaches El Cerrito del Norte and I join the chorus of
women, men and children of all ages to greet commuters with
songs - “We Shall Overcome,” “This Land is Your Land” and
“This Little Light of Mine”. Strangers look each other in the eye
and smile, some give us a thumbs up and stop to sing for a while.
The sky continues adding and dropping colors so glorious we gasp;
pause in our singing to watch strands of peach and magenta melt
into indigo before continuing with “Dona Nobis Pacem”.
Barbara Ann Firger is Boston born, San Diego “spoiled forever” and a Bay Area resident since 1986
not these streets
by Barbara Ann Firger
I confound the San Francisco streets
with other holidays and crossroads
turning my ear too many cold Januarys through March to a day
in June when it snowed on my birthday in Boston.
I do not love San Francisco streets or away from them.
My peace does not have snaps of San Francisco at odd angles to the words about lights
in a dark and longer and longer winter but one year
it hailed in July and my cat who thought she was a dog frozen
in fear beneath a branch protecting a length of faulty fence
between me and my neighbor was afraid to walk
across the broken bits of ice into my California house until I ran
and carried her home in here with warm towels and took real pictures not snaps
of July supper in too early darkness overlooking another foggy night
on the island far enough from San Francisco.
I bought a compass last year because it seemed peace was captured
in an ancient musical sphere of the universe and from the internet
collected planetary and starry flags persuading me to venture foolishly
again and again to watery borders of the island to watch
one more starry rug pulled from underneath my peaceful wishes
and swallowed by the twilight fog.
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