People’s Climate March:

April 2017, Washington, DC

 

We rose early and took to the street, mustering

between the Capitol and the White House,

free people in solidarity with science;

nobody believes the truth unless they see it sweat a little.

 

Yes, protest because April has become a summer month.

Yes, engineers in shorts and skirts singing along to a brass band.

Yes, the royal bellow of a conch blown by a graybeard hippie.

Yes, children of the internet with signs, sunburn, and heat headaches.

Yes, a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair, nodding as we march.

Yes, Cheyenne River Sioux, arrived from the West, with fists in the air.

 

It is the April that sends golden retrievers home with heat exhaustion,

after the presidential election

that blew the ornaments off the Christmas tree.

 

Send us a thunderstorm. Send us a shower.

 

May—cool your heels.

 

-John Dos Passos Coggin