Post-war 1947
born on the white
side of the tracks
Texas segregation
civil rights preacher's child
fled Texas with honor's diploma
for UC Berkeley and free speech
though I did not know then
that's why I leftVietnam war 1965
what war
are you fighting for
make love not war
college books tossed into a trunk in some room
I've never seen since
fires of internationalism called me
a girl
to enlist
in the anti-war
war against Amerikka
my own women's liberation on the linewar in Amerikka
war against the warmakers
white-skinned haters
capitalist consumers of human lives
following the tradition
Nat Turner John Brown
Wobblies subversives
resistance in the belly of the beastclandestine war 1973
captured by the killers
spirit killers nationkillers
a political prisoner
enemy of the state
terrorist and traitor
white woman dangerous
to white Amerika
condemned to years
and years of absence
a lifetimewarmakers
wait for its prisoners to die
or go crazy
or simply wither away into insignificanceI rest, a grain of sand
significant on the beach head that meets the sea
to face the storm
I wage resistance
to stay alive
I learn to search out freedom in the breath
my cells send out dendrites
to absorb the world and its offerings
I offer back
poems
and occasional grains of sand
mixed into clay and fired
into sturdinessAutumn 1999
This poem appeared in
Becky Thompson, A Promise and a Way of Life
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Marilyn's home page, her Wild Poppies poetry CD, other poems, Rescue the Word, writings on prison control units, on "Legal Issues for Women in Federal Prison", "On the Burning of African-American Churches".
Back to the Prison Activist Resource Center political prisoner page