Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "your very flesh shall be a great poem"

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Rebel Girl's friend who was dying has died - the only end of that particular story could have had for awhile now. Still, there it is, a fact that makes her breath catch and her eyes sting.

He was a public defender in the best sense of that word. She saw him these last years after her life had taken her south to Orange County at two kinds of venues: rock 'n roll concerts and good cause dinners. If there was music, they'd stand, for hours and sing along and dance, dance, dance, an aging coterie of lawyers, educators, community organizers, activists all, getting old, yes, drinking less, but willing to sing along late into the evening:

I saw two shooting stars last night. I wished on them – they were only satellites…Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care..

All those good cause dinners with the round tables and the round bread rolls, the white poly-blend tablecloths and napkins, and the speeches and the standing ovations and the promises and pledges we made to people, ourselves and each other, over and over again. Liberty Hill. Death Penalty Focus. National Lawyers Guild. ACLU. It occurs to her that we spent a lot of time standing for one thing and another, all of it good.

And then that last dinner, last fall that honored, among other people, their friend for his work. It was a benefit for Families to Amend Three Strikes. He couldn't make it but two round tables of friends did, in a ballroom at an LAX airport hotel. They watched as a video played and their friend spoke, reading his speech from a chair in his green backyard just before going back to the hospital for another surgery. He wasn't giving up on anything.

This is for him today and for all of us.

From the Preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855):

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your
income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience
and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and
with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air
every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at
school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your
very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and
in every motion and joint of your body. . .


(image is by Eric Drooker)