THE CHICAGO CONVENTION, MY MOTHER AND ME - AUGUST 28, 1968

This poem was evoked by a deeper exploration of my participation in the August, 28, 1968 protest in Chicago and by the poignant synchrony of a hospital visit that day and my mother’s passing soon thereafter. It also was amplified by the recent unrest in our country.

THE CHICAGO CONVENTION, MY MOTHER AND ME
AUGUST 28, 1968

I

Over 47 years had passed before I remembered
how happy I was that day, with the light of the sun shining
as we crossed over the bridges to the “Magnificent Mile.”

Jackson Boulevard Bridge vibrated like a drumhead under 6,000 feet
as we ran past the young soldiers.
Michigan Avenue was then ours; we celebrated a new, freer world,

perpendicular to history, reminding us of the joys of crossing,
from wet feet crossing childhood streams,
to ancestors’ crossing the Red Sea!

How happy they must have been,
those families, children, mothers, and fathers
sandaled feet drumming, dancing, running upon
the bare ocean floor.

Now I had 6,000 brothers and sisters,
dancing through the Red Sea’s opening down Michigan Avenue.

II

She was 47 and I was 20. I had to backtrack that day,
walking north on Michigan Avenue against the current,
to a hospital where my mother lay, cancer marching thru her body.

Moses at the Red Sea said, “Stand still!”
I stood still on the elevator up, then alongside her bed,
stood still, not knowing what to say
and she said, “You’re not David.”

I thought, “Maybe not.’
Stunned and speechless in the face of a dying mind,
Who am I? Where will our love go?
To how many old worlds must we say goodbye before
we can give birth to the new?

Suddenly she stretched her arms out,
snapping her fingers in rhythm to imaginary Greek music,
broadly smiling, extending arms fully to embrace the whole of life.

Well she knew what Zorba called the “Full Catastrophe,”
those fingers that had played the Italian Concerto 1,000’s of times,
those years when marriage, children, failed revolutions, madness and cancer all became too much to take.

At 20 it was too much for me to take.
I said good night, left her with dancing, outstretched arms, the pain and pleasure of love coursing through our hearts.

Now I know we are all floating on the same sea,
each wanting to cross over,
to reach that farther shore of peace and freedom.
Who do you love? Where does our love go?

III 

I went back from the hospital to the green grass, across from the Conrad Hilton, to this land with Hubert Humphrey, Mayor Daley,
David Dellinger, Allen Ginsberg, and 6,000 friends

And there we were, crowded together with our dreams, facing the powder blue of 1,000 police helmets,
a powder blue that only the sky deserves.

Messages from the world over reached us through loudspeakers –
the French students, the Cuban people, the Black P. Stone Rangers.
Protect us and this light of ours.

Incongruous, later that night, it began,
the war between a roaring sea and the shore,
the powder blue men with clubs
against the snake dance of hopeful liberators.

I stood as if on a distant bank, the human river
filled with broken and heroic hearts of our ancestors.
Then, as at the River of Babylon, they sat down and they wept
with sorrow and with joy and so did I.

Somehow we must all know how to change the world,
know the feeling of moments where sun and truth shine through,
and we can walk with wet feet through the open seas of time.

See us, creatures of flesh, light and catastrophe,
against the powder blue of sky – with ancestral arms,
my mother’s arms, all the joy-filled freedom fighters’ arms
waving us on.