Alice Weiss, a Somerville Bagel Bard was included in the poetry anthology Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology ( Foothills Publishing)     Her poem  DEWEY SQUARE, is set at ground zero for the Occupy Boston movement.   To order go to:  Foothillspublishing.com.

Dewey Square

Dome tents and blue plastic tarps porphyritic and smudged like a street woman’s topcoat,

ramrod straight plain-clothes cop in a piss-colored windbreaker, standing like debt,

boxes of carrots, battered apples, scribbled-on cardboard–inscriptions like unloaded pistols, peace being swordless–people in clusters arguing, praying, airing their tents–already

mildewing  from last night’s downpour–drums and timbales, a sukkah, a stage, duct tape,

a T-shirted apple eyed string quartet, early Beethoven, canticle, call and response, a portable

larger-than life size statue of Gandhi, eyeglasses down his nose and everything bronzed, tied

by a cord to what might be a disused aluminum light post, Indian cotton bandana tied on his

shoulders–gold thread entwined in the red figured weave–right hand open and stretched like a tap root or a flambeau carrier balancing a torch of kerosene-soaked fire cloth, wrapped

tightly around the thumb of his left hand, a Johnson’s Band Aid, as if in all of us running

to hold onto his hand, we had rubbed the skin raw and fixed it with whatever we had around.
– Alice  Weiss

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