#resist

I will be marching in Madison tomorrow.

I will be marching for the black women who raised me as a feminist. For the trans men and women with pussies and without. I will be marching for the interracial couples and families I love, for my friends in wheelchairs, for students with mental health issues. I will be marching for anyone who needs the ACA to stay alive and healthy. I will be marching for all of my LGBTQ+ family here and abroad.

I will be marching for the American heroes who have gone before me: Ida Wells and Eugene Debs, Malcolm X and Philip Randolph.

I will be marching for the trans men and women who lose their lives every year, for the Jewish Community Centers that have been dealing with bomb threats for weeks now, for the Muslim Centers who have received hate mail, for the NEH, the NEA, CPB, and the Office of Violence Against Women.

I will be marching because I can. I will march with Whitman’s barbaric yawp in my lungs.

#resist

Song of Myself, LII – Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.