The night was passing, futile days were blended,
propped upon my bed, imagining
how my age proceeds without the comfort
of metaphor, a prelude for tomorrow.
The customary quiet broke with voices,
not whispers of some stroller shuffling past.
My half-read books all clattered to the floor.
I staggered to the door beside my bed.
The street unrecognizable with chaos,
stretching back towards Constitution Square.
Angry protests, chants, and blood-red banners
shook the air above a line of youthful bodies,
raising fists and cursing out the Junta.
My fear was that my building might catch fire
and scattered ashes be my epitaph.
Then gangs of men in black who brandished clubs,
mercenaries, showed how force was prized.
And then, as if a dream of bold resistance,
I saw them from the corner of my eye.
Like me, the fury must have made them bolt
from rumpled beds, and interrupted love,
and let them step outside, and so they came
without the foolish fear that kept me silent.
Leaning from this balcony, I waited,
peering at the crowd of students, locked
arm-in-arm with scores of shouting workers,
my body bent upon the waist-high railing
while nervous sweat ran down my inclined neck.
And there upon the cobbled street I saw
displayed a youthful tide of fearlessness.
Since then I often walk along that space,
looking up so I could fashion it
into a memory, and with a word
command it turn to flesh and speak to me.
For such a moment I create details
for protest meetings I had wished I’d planned
in this city’s maze of pensiones,
cafes, and alleyways, I hurry past,
to save my ordinary, walled-in life.
Again, unyielding chaos hunts us down,
wherever we might look for some safe haven,
we wake to see it haunts us everywhere.
But somewhere banners will spell out: RESIST.