Forum Post: poem about Zuccotti

I have been crying since Cornel West said Zuccotti Park had a sweet spirit, I took a bus there, three buses, cried at the mahogany hand of the man sitting next to me, how from the yellow center of myself I wanted to fit into it, and then because hands still fit so miraculously together.

After the announcement the mayor made, we scrubbed the stone ground all night so he couldn't make us leave, brooms with broken handles, all us wearing plastic ponchos, lawyer's number written on our forearms. Two or three a.m. the rain fell, it punched down, but there was nothing mean about it. I thought, bibles will be written about this, the lightning and thunder over enormous New York, how the sight of the buildings' hugeness growled above, the new towers being built, us sweeping at their feet with heaven pouring down, not to clean us out but to help us clean it up and then we started laughing. We laughed with our mouths feeling bigger than we thought they could stretch. Laughed the whole world into them because the bibles are writing themselves and no one can write them, and some of us stretched a tarp above us, moved together and sang Folsom Prison Blues, singing so out of key, arms slung around each other, weeping and laughing again until someone told us the rain had stopped awhile ago.

Seven a.m. we were waiting, the police had been coming in busses, had been weeping out the doors of all their vehicles and I couldn't see much, we were hand to hand in the park, all bracing for the seizing of our sweet good world and how we'd weep for it, how we'd show the world our crystal weeping, and from the center we couldn't see it, but the people were coming, all around the park they were coming, standing on the sidewalk, protecting us like the huge arms of a mother, encircling the camp and you know what? The police didn't come for us, they couldn't come, and in that little way, we had won. That was the moment. Everyone threw up their fists, chanting, praising and stroking the sweet good world, it was the moment when we were one thing, one body of light, and I weeped, or rather the body weeped, a stranger kissed me beside my eye, or kissed himself, someone was holding my hand but I couldn't see them. We were hands fitting together, finally we were, for one moment we were hands holding each other in the perfection of braided prayer.