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- 06/27/2019
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Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are based on the authors' lives and experiences and may be changed to protect personal information. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Pride Month, and other Haibun - 11. 1940, 1970 and Today
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1940, 1970 and Today
Haibun
A poem I wrote many years ago belongs here, in Pride Month and Other Haibun. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the three days of rioting before the Stonewall Inn. It was June of the following year that the first Pride March happened, cementing the notion of being out and visible. Photographs show the same boys and girls – for they were merely brave, wonderful kids in their late teens and early twenties – who fought in the streets with their bones and blood to secure our liberties in the summer of ’69 led the protest parade in 1970.
Each time we take to the streets to reinforce our love, we should think of them. We should also recall the power behind the symbol of the pink triangle, for those who wore it also paid with their blood and bones.
Poem:
What if I were one of them,
one of the ones bound in a line –
on one side held by oppression,
on the stronger side still, by a fact –
bound because they couldn’t hide
what others easily scurry into themselves.
With shaven heads wrapped
in soil and sweat-combed rags,
the line without a sound conjoins
into a row of wasted solitude,
looking all calm, but beneath
a bitter quake of the heart.
One palm sweats where
its own nails bite,
longing for sweet revolt,
or just a little courage to touch
the mate it used to hold
so often and so well.
More spitefully, the living barbs
cut his flesh, bringing blood
to the face of constraint;
sweat and purity mingle
in the cupping want of his hand.
Fear, alive within reach, his eyes
feel sunken deeper in his brain,
but focus worked by weariness
brings an image to attention.
That head before his groping eyes
he sees as summers ago have seen –
where the back of ears were
once awash in sun-like hair –
he would play like a child
on a familiar beach,
stroke a fingertip from nape
around to the side of receiving lobe,
then like a dalliance, retread the way
to end in the sandy spot from which he began.
Letting go, his eyes befell the faded stripes
that downwards clothed the back before him,
and beneath, the shabby remains
of a body he used to feel his own.
Down to himself, his own badge –
the one they gave him as a shame –
he sees the pink triangle gone a dirty
emaciated hue of the time stolen from him.
But movement from in front
caught his ever-slowing glance,
and a blink required a second
to clear his vision,
but movement he saw
from the hand of he in front of him –
from the one he so longed to touch.
Perhaps not an invitation,
perhaps merely a glint
of movement hoping
across a blind desert
for the embrace of a loving eye.
Three sides, the man mused.
Half empty-hearted,
one side denies;
and if unfeeling can
deny a life away,
a second side is shame
to only be alive when
more than one, for
a group in uncurable
illness is a group in
pathetic penitence strong.
But the third and last
is redemption, the one
so few seem to find;
the acquittal of nature,
the strength to free her
of any wrong,
and that love of self
is the only love
to bring about
blessed absolution.
The man’s grip relaxed,
and the nails undug
their trench from his palm.
With one finger slowly raising,
his eyes re-found that
distant glimmer, and made for it
across the dead air of
time robbed from them.
Slowly, for the effort took much…
slowly, no one must see,
no one must, not for shame,
not for grief, but for no other
reason than a secret love
ever wants its innocence.
Again he woke his eyes to focus,
only to feel the palm of his belovèd
take the finger in affection.
A moment only, but neither needed more.
quickly, he drew his hand away
and then saw a guard
had seen their touch.
To the man, the soldier boy
was familiar – the same sweet look
he knew so well – the look his lover
used to wear so mildly
and so openly in the Berlin of old.
A lump hitched in his throat;
not only had this boy seen,
but he was one of them;
one of them hidden and helpless.
The man had no illusions;
such types were the most deadly
to his type – the caught,
the unapologetic, the “uncured,”
and the natural….
He feared the worst. He felt
sorry it meant the same pain
for his belovèd as himself,
wishing he could absorb it
for the man he loved.
A flinch of pity appeared
across the young face;
the guard moved silently away.
Eventually, the order came
and the line of men
trudged forward at a shuffling pace,
their last movement, for
outside the camp gates,
a ditch awaited them.
So the order was brought about
against those – the accusèd Queers –
by the un-accusèd ones
in a place called Belsen.
But what if I were one of them,
the trickle in the streets who,
by the end of morning,
thousands found themselves.
One of the ones who joined
autonomous limbs and built
an unhanded chain to sweep
arbitrary subjugation aside.
One who reveled in the
sheer weight of all my companions,
we being one, we taking
power so long denied.
Alive in the joy of freedom,
itching for the chance to fight –
whole, happy, strong –
with the strength
of newborns.
What if I were one of them,
the ones who marched on
a bright summer day –
one year to the day –
after Stonewall.
What if I were amongst
the first takers of the
Rights of Queers!
Postlude:
Sonnet
But those generations are gone for me,
Though less than one divides the former from
The one that got all of our liberty;
Thirty-year rebellion from martyrdom.
And yet today among the crowd I saw
Beauty has eyes and hands, and kept below
Levi’s brand, are treasures near the draw,
Handy enough to keep me in sorrow.
Moving like one beyond their concerning,
One boy saw and shyly knew the compliment –
As shadows blew me his glance returning,
Our commonest love with the crowd’s was blent.
Though such days are past, those they loved I see;
I’ll fight that these years belong to him and me!
◇ ◇ ◇
photo from the first Pride March, June 1970
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Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are based on the authors' lives and experiences and may be changed to protect personal information. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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