Cathy Barber, Will Walker and Don Paul
This Demonstration Has Not Been Authorized
by Cathy Barber
This demonstration has not been authorized.
You have no permit
and you exceed a safe number.
This demonstration
will impede pedestrian traffic
and free commerce.
You may assemble, with a permit,
just two miles from here.
You may not block government buildings.
Failure to disperse will result in arrest.
You must leave now.
Please gather your signs and banners peacefully.
You have no right to be here.
In the future, a small, representative group may protest
at the government-approved location.
You must disperse now...
You must disperse now...
You must disperse now...
This demonstration has not been authorized.
You will be arrested.
Gather your signs and banners quickly
and leave peacefully.
Now.
Poems and stories of Cathy Barber have been published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Tattoo Highway, bear creek haiku, The Kerf, Brevities,
and in the anthology, An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 911. She has an M.A. in English from California State University,
Hayward where she received awards for her poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
Winter Sun
by Will Walker
Walking in the afternoon in winter in the sun
I'm struck by beauty all around.
Things glow with the burnished winter light.
Even the broken pieces of memory
seem green and beautiful and stroll with me
congenially in the afternoon sun as I wander
through the park and stop in awe
of an eighty-foot elder of a eucalyptus
spreading its many limbs to catch
sunlight on every leaf and branch.
As I look and walk towards the tree
with its jade-like strips of light-green bark,
even the man in leather standing with his back to me
pissing in a bush seems almost beautiful, though I hesitate
to tell him so, because he's busy arching his back
and craning his neck like he's waiting
for a ten-car police posse to surround him.
Nearby/ another man sits on a bench with his head
cradled in his hands, and he appears despondent
but also beautiful. I want to tell him my recent dream
in which I hear of a tribe
where the gods are humans who have been elevated
through suffering, but I think it best
to let him go on cradling his head in peace.
The sun still touches him silently on the shoulder
and makes him beautiful just sitting there.
Nearer the tree spreading its limbs
in the warm winter sun, I see
another traveler who has sat down by the trunk
to bask in the light and wait
for some unknown blessing to appear.
He, too, is beautiful sitting in the sun,
though possibly he has no other place to go
and may sit up against the bark,
just breathing, till the light is gone.
Peace, says one wise soul, is every step.
My true religion, says another, is kindness.
My true religion, I say, is walking in peace
in the winter sun.
Will Walker is a former editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.
His poems have appeared in The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Bark, Street Sheet, Street Spirit,
This Far Together (an anthology of the first fifteen years of the Haight Journal), and an anthology drawn from contributions to Street Sheet.
Blown Away
by Don Paul
I saw peasants dancing for Brueghel
People with guitars, songs of their own
All blown a-way----All blown a-way
All blown a-way----All blown a-way
I saw Churches and wagons, greens on
The hillsides, factories and trains
All blown a-way----All blown a-way
All blown a-way----All blown a-way
I saw children with one eye
Children with one arm
Children wishing they'd never been born
Children wishing they had guns to turn on their
pain
All blown a-way----All blown a-way
All blown a-way----All blown a-way
I saw suits seated at Banquets
Men high in safe places and speaking at mics
Men bragging on their success
From throwing strikes of mass death
And so they play----And so they'll stay
Till they're blown away----All blown away.
Don Paul is a writer, performer, musician and activist. His books have been praised by some of the outstanding literary and/or political figures of the past half century, including Jeannette
Armstrong, Malcolm Cowley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Matt Gonzalez, Yuri Kochiyama, John Logan and Tillie Olsen. Apart from his writing, Paul is the leader or producer of more than 20 recordings, including the
albums Flowers Smell Of Gasoline, Love Is The Main Flame, and Fat Snake’s Tongue Has Got Talking Heads (all 2004) and the Rebel Poets’ albums Worlds Made Flesh (1989) and America Fears The Drum (1992)
as well as CDs by Glenn Spearman, Lisle Ellis, India Cooke, Paul Plimley, the Daughters of Yam, Ben Goldberg and Ustad Salamat Ali Khan. As an athlete he qualified for the 1980 and 1988 U.S. Olympic
Marathon Trials and held the World Road Best for running 50 kilometers (2:50:55) between 1982 and 1994. He’s been a cannery-worker in San Jose and northwest Washington, a dishwasher in Illinois,
a logger in southeast Alaska, and an oil-field roughneck in Texas and Louisiana. He now works with the organization From the Ground Up in the Bay View Hunters Point district of San Francisco.
More information is available at www.wireonfire.com/donpaul.
