I was born too late to be a hippie and I grew up in the rural north, not exactly the site of mass protests and marches in the streets (we had hardly any streets). But I remember being a little girl and sitting in the high school cafeteria before elementary school started (my mother was a high school teacher and we sometimes rode to town with her to avoid the school bus horror show) observing the gigantic and intimidating high schoolers and wondering what the black armbands on some of their arms meant. It isn’t easy to give up hope, to escape a dream, says Dorianne Laux in this haunting poem. Nor should it be.

Listening to Paul Simon

     – Dorianne Laux

Such a brave generation.

We marched onto the streets

in our T-shirts and jeans, holding

the hand of the stranger next to us

with a trust I can’t summon now,

our voices raised in song.

Our rooms were lit by candlelight,

wax dripping onto the table, then

onto the floor, leaving dusty

starbursts we would pop off

with the edge of a butter knife

when it was time to move.

But before we packed and drove

into the middle of our lives

we watched the leaves outside

the window shift in the wind

and listened to Paul Simon,

his cindery voice, then fell back

into our solitude, leveled our eyes

on the American horizon

that promised us everything

and knew it was never true:

smoke and blinders, insubstantial

as fingerprints on glass.

It isn’t easy to give up hope,

to escape a dream. We shed

our clothes and cut our hair,

our former beauty piled at our feet.

And still the music lived inside us,

whole worlds unmaking us

in the dark, so that sleeping and waking

we heard the train’s distant whistle,

steel trestles shivering

across the land that was still ours

in our bones and hearts, its lone headlamp

searching the weedy stockyards,

the damp, gray rags of fog.