While we lie in the road to block traffic from the air-force base,
over there the dead are strewn in the roads.

While we are carried to the bus and off to jail to be ‘processed’,
over there the torn-off legs and arms of the living
hang in burnt trees and on broken walls.

While we wait and sing in ugly but not uninhabitable cells
men and women contorted, blinded, in tiger cages, 
    are biting their tongues
to stifle, for each other’s sake their cries of agony.
And those cruel cages are built in America.

While we refuse the standard prison liverwurst sandwiches,
knowing we’ll get decent food in a matter of hours,
over there free fighters, young and old, guns never laid aside,
eat a few grains of rice and remember
Uncle Ho, and the long years he ate no better, and smile.

And while we fear
for the end of earth-life, even though we sing
and rejoice in each other’s beauty and comradeship.

over there they mourn
the dead and mutilated each has seen.

They have seen and seen and heard and heard
all that we will ourselves with such effort to imagine,
to summon into understanding…