Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2020

 

Video Clip (Poet as Young Revolutionary, Berkeley 1969)

Before cameras at the news conference, he so precise and bold,
exacting, yet more heated than I recall.
What felt was suffered there?

Aunt Edna, cranium-cracked in the Model-T’s splash,
struck by a white Delta rancher, but no justice,
Chinese couldn’t testify in court.

Or his parents’ lowered gaze as that realtor wouldn’t show
a house in El Cerrito,
amidst the East Bay’s blonde hills?

Here, a 19-year-old in profile, not one crease nor pimple,
no masking gray, receding temples,
but his angry lips amply full (our one faithful constant).

In Eshleman’s chambers before a mic, youth flares
in Don Davis’s haloed afro,
Ysidro’s shaky smoke-spiraling hand,

and this Chinese American teen chosen to enunciate the 5 demands
for Third World student strike, a shout out
orchestrated by politicos

(his leader too levied with the FBI to go, but that
secret as yet unrevealed).
So just now, his tortoise-shell rims adhesive-taped,

curly locks still jet-black, and clad in a camouflaged
poncho like a hunter ex-hippie,
he begins to articulate,

to say what hadn’t been uttered before
but what’s to be declared over and
once again.

What news yet gathers upon this mini-screen?
A boy is but once,
and though revolutions may play and flip,

change so framed, once affixed,
holds the essence in
a video clip.