for Cleve Jones
Movements come in waves and waves come in sets. One certainly predicts another.
At the time of the incident the following poem describes I had been working as a trade show worker at Brooks Hall in San Francisco.
That particular night I got off around ten, exhausted, and climbed up the concrete stairwell to the open air. Within a few minutes, I was in the middle of a violent demonstration in front of SF’s city hall, the culmination of an angry march from the Castro the day after the verdict came down for Dan White, who had shot and killed supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor Moscone: manslaughter on both counts.
The gay community was outraged. For a public official to kill two other elected officials and not be convicted of murder, to have the sentence reduced to manslaughter on the grounds he was temporarily not responsible for his actions because he was on a sugar rush, having gorged himself on Hostess Twinkies, was blatant injustice. It went beyond sexual orientation issues to defy the laws democracy is founded on. It reduced electoral process to gang warfare and exposed civilized life as a hypocritical veneer.
I felt a drastic contrast between the world I’d just been part of and the scene suddenly around me, where anything might happen, and was happening. It came as a jolt. To some extent we usually live in a bubble in our everyday lives, a bubble that protects us even as it imprisons us. The contrast I felt between that and the world where anything can happen is similar to what is going on today. The streets of the world are becoming the stage.
I came up out of Brooks Hall
the old convention center beneath Civic Auditorium
tired from working until ten at night
into the Dan White riots
a police car was on fire
a long line of newspaper racks knocked over also on fire
the plaza full of protesters
culminating a candle-light vigil down Market Street from the Castro
to throng beneath City Hall, a gothic dome
that rose above the hostile crowd
Supervisor Diane Feinstein, elevated to mayor
by way of Moscone having been murdered by Supervisor Dan White
came out into a niche in the castle like a tiny doll
our new queen, no doubt aghast at the spectacle
and the murders that had provoked it
helpless above the scene below
I was afraid to go too far into the crowd but was drawn in nonetheless
although hung more toward the back
my attention caught by a lean white guy blowing a whistle
urgently, wherever the crowd quieted down
he seemed apart from the demonstrators
and when he saw me looking at him
darted away
I began to notice replicas of him, almost identical
shifting throughout the crowd blowing whistles
wherever the crowd grew quiet
I had the hunch
they were some sort of government agitators
maybe hoping to incite enough violence
to justify unleashing the police
the incident in fact was not without casualties:
I read in the paper a few days later a policeman
took a brick in the nuts
and lost a testicle
the whole spectacle felt medieval
flickering shadows cutting apart the scene like a collage
above it the moon
having witnessed many riots and atrocities in her time
hung splendidly
bestowing serene radiance
as she has done for millennia
calmly pulling ocean tides
back and forth over the earth like a black gown
the suspiring waves rising and lapsing, as if the earth
were breathing in deep sleep
despite another violent nightmare.
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