Countless Schemes

 

Countless schemes have been proposed for solving or dismissing this problem, most of them impracticable or impossible. Of this class are such proposals as: (1) the deportation of 12,000,000 Negroes to Africa; (2) the establishment of a separate Negro state in the United States; (3) complete separation and segregation from the whites and the establishment of a caste system or peasant class; and (4) hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race. (The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot, 1922, published by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, page xxiii)

1
you don’t have enough boats

we came here head to toe
spoiling like old meat
in every liquid thing a body can make
the bravest gone to Yemaya
and now we are millions
and now we demand to sit upright

and so you don’t have enough boats

2
you would give us the most wretched desert,
not the desert of our fathers where god is watching
and manna comes down like the snow.
you would give us a desert of sorrows and nothing.
you would give us the dream
where you want only to yell and no noise comes
you would give us all that is barren
you would give our children sand to eat

3
we been had that

4
you said
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro
hope for a solution through the dying out

you said hope for the Negro dying
hope through the dying
hope for the dying out
the solution dying

you said dying. the Negro
the Negro dying
the Negro hope
hope the Negro

you said hope for dying
hope dying
dying
dying

you said hope

 

Eve L. Ewing

1919 Poems

Our Purpose in Poetry: Or, Earthrise

On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronaut Bill Anders 
Snapped a photo of the earth
As Apollo 8 orbited the moon.
Those three guys 
Were surprised
To see from their eyes
Our planet looked like an earthrise
A blue orb hovering over the moon’s gray horizon, 
with deep oceans and silver skies. 

It was our world’s first glance at itself 
Our first chance to see a shared reality, 
A declared stance and a commonality; 

A glimpse into our planet’s mirror,
And as threats drew nearer,
Our own urgency became clearer,
As we realize that we hold nothing dearer 
than this floating body we all call home. 

We’ve known
That we’re caught in the throes
Of climactic changes some say
Will just go away,
While some simply pray
To survive another day;
For it is the obscure, the oppressed, the poor, 
Who when the disaster
Is declared done,
Still suffer more than anyone. 

Climate change is the single greatest challenge of our time, 

Of this, you’re certainly aware.
It’s saddening, but I cannot spare you
From knowing an inconvenient fact, because
It’s getting the facts straight that gets us to act and not to wait. 

So I tell you this not to scare you, 
But to prepare you, to dare you 
To dream a different reality, 

Where despite disparities
We all care to protect this world,
This riddled blue marble, this little true marvel 
To muster the verve and the nerve
To see how we can serve
Our planet. You don’t need to be a politician
To make it your mission to conserve, to protect, 
To preserve that one and only home
That is ours,
To use your unique power
To give next generations the planet they deserve. 

We are demonstrating, creating, advocating 
We heed this inconvenient truth, because we need to be anything but lenient
With the future of our youth. 

And while this is a training,
in sustaining the future of our planet, 
There is no rehearsal. The time is 
Now
Now
Now, 
Because the reversal of harm,
And protection of a future so universal 
Should be anything but controversial. 

So, earth, pale blue dot 
We will fail you not. 

Just as we chose to go to the moon 
We know it’s never too soon
To choose hope.
We choose to do more than cope 
With climate change 
We choose to end it—
We refuse to lose.
Together we do this and more
Not because it’s very easy or nice
But because it is necessary,
Because with every dawn we carry
the weight of the fate of this celestial body orbiting a star. 
And as heavy as that weight sounded, it doesn’t hold us down, 
But it keeps us grounded, steady, ready, 
Because an environmental movement of this size 
Is simply another form of an earthrise. 

To see it, close your eyes.
Visualize that all of us leaders in this room
and outside of these walls or in the halls, all
of us changemakers are in a spacecraft,
Floating like a silver raft
in space, and we see the face of our planet anew.
We relish the view;
We witness its round green and brilliant blue,
Which inspires us to ask deeply, wholly:
What can we do?
Open your eyes.
Know that the future of
this wise planet
Lies right in sight:
Right in all of us. Trust
this earth uprising.
All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core, 
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for. 

 

Dedicated to Al Gore and The Climate Reality Project 

The following poem by Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States Amanda Gorman (link is external) was read from stage at the Los Angeles Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training on Tuesday, August 28, 2018.

 

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. 

Thomas Jefferson

Letter to John Holmes, 1820

As it was, so it shall be

This crisis mentality is a vital component of the process of political change.  There were no assurances, no guarantees of success, and a constant fear that the entire structure would come crashing to ruin.  Imposing patterns on the period in hindsight, we often forget that this was a world of chance and circumstance, where voting patterns and probabilities that seem obvious to us were obscured in a cloud of uncertainties and fears. 

Affairs of Honor

Joanne B. Freeman

"The Hill We Climb", Amanda Gorman

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it.

Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.

That even as we grieved, we grew.

That even as we hurt, we hoped.

That even as we tired, we tried.

That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.

Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.

We feared at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.

But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.

Our blunders become their burdens.

But one thing is certain.

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the golden hills of the West.

We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sun-baked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.

The new dawn balloons as we free it.

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

 

Waltzing with bears

John Muir said that if it ever came to a war between the races, he would side with the bears.  That day has arrived. 

Dave Foreman

"Strategic Monkeywrenching"

 

quoted in I'm With the Bears. Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, edited by Mark Martin

"Catch The Fire"

 

(Sometimes I wonder:
What to say to you now
in the soft afternoon air as you
hold us all in a single death?)
I say—
Where is your fire?
I say—
Where is your fire?
You got to find it and pass it on.

You got to find it and pass it on
from you to me from me to her from her
to him from the son to the father from the
brother to the sister from the daughter to
the mother from the mother to the child.

Where is your fire?  I say where is your fire?
Can’t you smell it coming out of our past?
The fire of living…not dying
The fire of loving…not killing
The fire of Blackness…not gangster shadows.
Where is our beautiful fire that gave light
to the world?
The fire of pyramids;
The fire that burned through the holes of
slaveships and made us breathe;

The fire that made guts into chitterlings;
The fire that took rhythms and made jazz;

The fire of sit-ins and marches that made
us jump boundaries and barriers;
The fire that took street talk sounds
and made righteous imhotep raps.
Where is your fire, the torch of life
full of Nzingha and Nat Turner and Garvey
and DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin
and Malcolm and Mandela.
Sister/Sistah  Brother/Brotha  Come/Come

CATCH YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
HOLD YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
LEARN YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
BE THE FIRE…DON’T KILL
Catch the fire and burn with eyes
that see our souls:
WALKING.
SINGING.
BUILDING.
LAUGHING.
LEARNING.
LOVING.
TEACHING.
BEING.
Hey.  Brother/Brotha.  Sister/Sista.
Here is my hand.
Catch the fire…and live.
live.
livelivelive.
livelivelive.
live.

Sonia Sanchez 

"Words born of turmoil and misunderstanding/I write of visions I see through the haze"

"San Diego Evening Tribune." The speaker is a woman.  "A simpler question than Gary's: Can songs change the world?"

Too much like hard work for me, thinks Dean, looking at Elf, who looks at Griff, who says, "Hey I just drum along."

"Songs do not change the world", declares Jasper. "People do.  People pass laws, riot, hear God, and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars."  Jasper lights a Marlboro.  "Which raises a question.  'Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?' My answer is 'Ideas and Feelings.' Which begs a question. 'Where do ideas and feelings originate?' My answer is, 'Others. One's heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs.' Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time.  Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines from nine or ten songs.  Dean recognizes "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Strange Fruit", and "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine."  Others, Dean can't identify, but the hardboiled press pack look on.  Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. "Where will these song-seeds land?  It's the Parable of the Sower.  Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don't take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready.  Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy.  Assurance. Cathartic sorrow.  The idea that life could be, should be, better than this.  An invitation to slip into somebody else's skin for a little while.  If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world."

Bloody hell, thinks Dean.  I live with this guy.

"Why's everyone gone quiet?" Slightly alarmed, Jasper asks the band.  "What that weird? Did I go too far?"

 Utopia Avenue

David Mitchell

'

Days of Future Passed

 Five years later, I take a deep shuddery breath to stop myself crying.  It's not just that I can't hold Aoife again, it's everything.  It's grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office -- all so we didn't have to change our cozy lifestyles.  People talk about the Endarkment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it's a plague of God.  But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through.  My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing -- while denying -- that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.  

The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell 

(c) 2014 

"Is is strange to say I miss the bodies of others?"

In the way that absence illuminates desire, and breakage illuminates function — you don’t notice the doorknob until it twists off in your hand — quarantine has made it plain to me how much I miss the daily, unspoken, casual company of strangers, the people whose names and lives I’ll never know, who populate my ordinary urban days with their bodies on the subway, their glances on the sidewalk, their stray comments at the A.T.M., their hands holding whole milk and gummy bears in front of me in the bodega line.

It was in the early months of my separation that I started to become acutely aware of this gratitude for the peculiar anonymous company that urban living offers — for the cafe just downstairs from my new apartment, where many of the same regular customers gathered each morning: the amiable elderly man chain-smoking and mansplaining trans-Atlantic politics; the mom-friends with their parked bassinets; the 20-something boys reading Bakhtin and Heidegger who never offered to help me carry my stroller up the stoop stairs. In the aftermath of my household unraveling, it was an acute and unexpected comfort to find this daily ragtag cohort just downstairs — a looser household, but a household nonetheless.

Walking late at night on Flatbush Avenue, I appreciated all the anonymous strangers I passed for the ways they suggested, even if I didn’t know their stories, how many different ways it was possible to craft a life. The man buying mangoes at the bodega just before midnight? Maybe he was a father of five. Maybe he was a single father of five. Maybe he and his husband were trying to adopt. Maybe he and his wife had been trying to have a child for years. Maybe he and his wife knew they didn’t want a child; maybe they were saving up to travel the world instead. Maybe he lived alone with his aging mother. Who could know his story? I never would. But I didn’t need to. I only needed to know, through his presence on that sidewalk, that so many plotlines for a life were possible.

When we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers, we don’t just lose the tribal solace of company, but the relief from solipsism — the elbow brush of other lives unfurling just beside our own, the reminder of other people’s daily survival, the reminder that there are literally seven billion other ways to be alive besides the particular way I am alive; that there are countless other ways to be lonely besides the particular ways I am lonely; other ways to hope, other ways to seek joy.

Leslie Jamison

The New York Times

September 27, 2020

Mississippi: A Poem, In Days

 

Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.

It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

The worst of white folk will not be persuaded; they can only be beaten. And when they are beaten, they fight more ferociously. They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we’ve shown exquisite grace, an enemy we’ve tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.

Titillation.

I lather my hands in sanitizer and google gun shops in Lafayette County on my phone. I do not believe in guns. I do not believe in prisons. Yet I know I need one if I am to continue living alone in this Mississippi, American town.

I look at the grizzled cotton fields outside my truck window on Highway 6. I want to ask, where am I?

But I know.

This is not home.

If this is home, it is not healthy.

I do not want to humiliate. I do not want to be humiliated. I do not want to kill. I do not want to be killed. I want us to be free. I know what I feel. I know what I’ve felt. I must buy a gun if I continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, so I cannot continue to live in Oxford, Mississippi, no more. It took way too much Black death to get here, and here is where I’d love to live without guns, without prisons, without monuments of humiliation, without the undervalued expected sacrifice of essential workers, without the worst of white folks. Here is where I’d like to tenderly, honestly, radically live and love with you.

And here, one day, will be Mississippi.

 

Kiese Makeba Laymon

Vanity Fair, September 2020  

The word "my" brings pleasure.  The word "my" brings pain.  These are true words for masters as well as slaves.  When they are drunk, we become invisible to them.  Their talk turns to owning, or to profit, or loss, or buying, or selling, or stealing, or hiring, or renting, or swindling.  For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships.  They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands.  They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas.  Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison.  They complain they are not free.  Only Dr. Marinus is free from these complaints.  His skin is a white man's, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a white man's soul. His soul is much older.  On Weh, we would call him a kwaio.  A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns, each time in a new child.  A good kwaio may become a shaman, but nothing in this world is worse than a bad kwaio. 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
David Mitchell

One of what we all are, Pelly. Less than a drop in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems some of the drops sparkle, Pelly. Some of them do sparkle!

My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear aught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity.  My thoughts flow thus.  Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rise & fall of civilizations.  My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief. 

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world.  If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail.  You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds.  What of it if our consciences itch?  Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? What fight the "natural" (oh weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul: for the human species, selfishness is extinction.  

Is this the doom written within our nature? 

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe diverse races & creeds can share this world as peacefully as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & and the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.  I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real.  Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.  

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.  Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response: "Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam.  But don't tell me about justice.  Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's!  Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses!  You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified!  Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you grasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops? 

Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
2004

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making.

blackswangreen
David Mitchell

Whitey on the moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be paying still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man just upped my rent last night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's upping me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already paying him fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes taking my whole damn check,
Junkies making me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is going up,
An' as if all that shit was't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made last year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I just about had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Gil Scott-Heron

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o' that kayak.  Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul.  Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds. 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Archivist: Weren't you curious about Union's blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America.  Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

Sonmi-451: You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist, I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An Abyss cannot be crossed in two steps". 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Archivist: Fantasy, lunacy. 

Somni-451: All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

"When I think of the road we're travelling on, I can't help but wonder what's gone wrong."

"Your ignorance, Bat!  It's not funny! It's agony! You're Einstein's tea-lady, Newton's wig-delouser, Hawkings's puncture-repairer!  You fanfare your 'Information Revolution', your e-mail, your v-mail, your vid-cons!  As if information itself is thought! You have no idea what you've made!  You are all lapdogs, believing your collars to be halos! Information is control.  Everything you think you know, every image on every screen, every word on every phone, every digit on every VDU, who do you think has got their hands on it before it gets to you?  Comet Aloysius could be on a collision course with Grand Central Station, and unless your star guest here chose to let the instruments he controls tell your scientists, you wouldn't know a thing until you woke up one morning to find no sun and a winter of five hundred years!  You wouldn't recognize the end of the world if it flew up your nose and died there!"

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell

"If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation."

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all"

Ferron – It Won't Take Long Lyrics

They said some men would be warriors and some men would be kings
And some men would be owners of land and other man-made things
And false love as the eternal flame would move some to think in rings
And gold would be our power and other foolish things
But you who dream of liberty must not yourselves be fooled
Before you get to plea for freedom, you've agreed to being ruled
If the body stays a shackle then the mind remains a chain
That'll link you to a destiny whereby all good souls are slain
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"What has that got to do with me" and I say,
"You mean to tell me that's all?"
 
Of three men in a desert wandering, one is knowing and two are scared
They say time is in the river, but the river is not there
Dry in spirit dry in body two will lend themselves to death
And in grief one weeps into his hands and drinks his bitter tears
'Cause it don't take long, it don't take too long at all
It don't take long, and you may say,
"I don't know what you're talking about," and I say
"You mean to tell me that's all?"
And as I stand before you now, I am hopeful in my rage
You know love has finally called for me, I will not wilt upon it's stage
But still smaller than my nightmare now do I print upon the page
Do we have to live inside it's walls to identify the cage?
'Cause it takes so long, why does it take so long,
But it takes so long, and you may say,
"I don't really care what you're talking about," and I say,
"Are you trying to say you don't belong?"
 
I am my mother's daughter, but I have seen myself in you
It's this blessing that I follow now, and so I must speak true
I dreamed of thousands dying, it was you and you and you,
And while the city sleeps so quietly there is something we must do
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't know if I wanna know what you're getting at,"
And it makes we wanna say, "So long."
Because grief will come in measures, only grief alone will know
And you'll see it on your family, on your own face it will grow
And they'll try to keep you hungry, then they'll tell you to eat snow
You know pride can be a moving thing if we learn the strength of "NO!"
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't think this has anything to do with me,"
"But did you ever think you could be wrong?"
 
At noon on one day coming, human strength will fill the streets
Of every city on our planet, hear the sound of angry feet
With business freezed up in the harbour, the kings will pull upon their
Hair
And the banks will shudder to a halt, and the artists will be there
'Cause it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't think I can be a part of that," and it makes me want to say,
"Don't you want to see yourself that strong?"
Division between the peoples will disappear that honoured day
And though oceans lie between us, lifted candles light the way
Half will join their hands by moonlight, the rest under a rising sun
As underneath the sun and moon, a ritual'd wailing has begun
And it won't take long, it won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't know how to be a part of what you're talking about," and it makes
Me want to say, "Come on!"
 
And beware you sagging diplomats, for you will not hear one gun
And though our homes be torn and ransacked we will not be undone
For as we let ourselves be bought, we're going to let ourselves be free
And if you think we stand alone, look again and you will see:
We are children in the rafters, we are babies in the park,
We are lovers at the movies, we are candles in the dark,
We are changes in the weather, we are snowflakes in July,
We are women grown together, we are men who easily cry,
We are words not quickly spoken, we're the deeper side of try,
We are dreamers in the making, we are not afraid of "Why?"

The War Is Over (full version)

Silent soldiers on a silver screen
Framed in fantasies and dragged in dream
Unpaid actors of the mystery
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free
And what's this got to do with me

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over
All the children play with Gatling guns 
Tattooed mothers with their tattooed sons 
The strong will wonder if they're surely strong 
It doesn't matter lately whether we are right or wrong 
But surely we've gone on too long

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Cardboard cowboys in a new frontier 
Drowning Indians in vats of beer 
The troops are leaving on the Trojan train 
The sun is in their eyes but I am hiding from the rain
 Now one of us must be insane

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Drums are drizzling on a grain of sand
Fading rhythms of a fading land
Prove your courage in the proud parade
Trust your leaders where mistakes are almost never made
And they're afraid that I'm afraid

I'm afraid the war is over
It's over, it's over

But at least we're working, building tanks and planes 
And a race is coming so we can't complain 
The master of the march has lost his mind 
Perhaps, some other war, this fabled farce would all be fine 
But now we're running out of time 

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grizzly game
One is guilty and the other gets the point to blame
Pardon me if I refrain

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find a flag so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

One-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe

I believe the war is over
It's over, it's over

Phil Ochs 

And the world disappeared as though shot with a warm whisky gun
As proudly we played and frolicked in desperate fun
The cold night was laughing and waiting outside of the room
So here's where I'll stand and drink with the damned
And take it out of my youth.

Phil Ochs