Strung out along the highway,  

waving signs at grinning traffic,  

our little clot of protest  

suffers under judgmental sun.  

  

Even in shade we wilt and nod  

with a greedy vegetable thirst.  

Local cops cruise us and wave  

from air-conditioned vehicles  

  

braced with massive bumpers  

and armed with loaded shotguns.  

You comment on every honk  

and friendly gesture, count  

  

the few rude middle fingers,  

note that certain auto colors  

seem friendlier than others.  

Like kids on a boring road trip  

  

we pass the hot noon hour  

parsing tenor and baritone  

registers of tooting horns.  

The rare soprano or bass  

  

confounds our calculations  

but amuses and alerts us  

to factors we can’t account for.  

So the protest protests itself  

  

in the cool secret dark inside us.  

The message of our signs exhorts  

a more thoughtful and inclusive  

lifestyle, urbane and sculpted  

  

in the finest Carrara marble.  

But America’s too ramshackle  

and nervous for such a vision,  

the tattered pages of bibles 

torn from tired old bindings  

and wafting across rock-hard sky,  

miming and mocking angel wings.  

We’ll never escape the politics  

  

of barbecued meat suffering  

as the thickest flavors must.  

We’ll never unravel every thread  

of that fatuous Confederate flag  

  

flying against a thunderstorm.  

I watch you watching the traffic.  

We look too small and irrelevant  

to punctuate the national text;  

  

but at least we hold our ground  

more firmly than Charles the First  

held England the moment before   

his head fell into a basket.