By Jacquelyn Mahendra

Stroller-striped red and white reflections
Flicker fabulous, half-formed melody
Of a movement, so
This is the sound
Of a hundred thousand feet
Beating pavement

They invoke unknown protections
In the four cardinal directions, with me, here
Standing almost still in the thick of it

I, neither truly onlooker, nor activist,
Nor cameraman, I pan
To the beautiful brown babies
Flapping red-blue flags
Still knowing—well at least here is to hoping—
That you can’t argue
With a child’s smile

That, yes, we are all still flesh
And cartilage deep down- we,
Who move from excrement
To relevant, from shelter-seekers
To keepers of our own morality
As we scutter up the rungs
Of self-realized realities, neither
Truly united nor divided
By these sticky hate-laced speeches
Leaving only a little to the wind,
And even less to the imagination, when

There’s so much left here to wonder at
So many ways to shape a question
With the answers lying somewhere
Between tolerance
And simple logic
A real beginning to realize the
Unmistakable connectedness
Of our futures, that

There’s no way around this
precipice, the present,
This cavity, into which
we now pour our energy
So as to survive