Family Gathering
The streets will teem with swells of witness again,
the crowd’s magnitude risen to match the crime.
Batons held overhead by those helmeted men
in ballistic Kevlar vests, it will be time,
and soon enough the guard’s hard line will advance,
the thousands packed close in protest pressed, pressed back
against walls and fences, the near-breathless congregants
prodded, incensed, panicked—then, the attack,
the bludgeons swung down in quick arcs to crack skulls
and clavicles, as if, this time, that would quiet
the storm, as if such crackdown ever dulls
outrage. But once again, they’ll try it—
young uniformed men with clubs blood-crown their kin.
They’ll do it for their king’s blind eye and cold grin.
Jed Myers has authored Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award) and The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, forthcoming). Recent honors include The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize and the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award. Recent poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Rattle, and Southern Poetry Review. He’s the poetry editor for Bracken.
Header photo by Stocksnap, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Jed Myers by Alina Rios.
