Vox Populi
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Penelope Moffet: Peace March
Carry your light out into the shitstorm,
Joan Baez writes, and what a swirl of turds
it is. One protester drives her car
into another protester’s car and the one who’s hit
says No problem, don’t worry, it’s fine,
until she tries to drive away.
A man leans into his horn so enthusiastically
he guns into a curb and his tire explodes.
Other drivers honk and wave, a few with one finger.
None of us knows if it makes any sense
to be here, yet we gather once a month,
lift our signs, learn each other’s stories.
Today I’m jangled up inside, all rusty
wires and bolts, twisted metal scraps,
but I try to breathe deep, believe
the PEACE I wrote in foot-high
multi-colored chalk pastels on cardboard
carries light.
Poem (c) 2026 Penelope Moffet.
Born in Lorain, Ohio, Penelope Moffet has lived most of her life in Southern California. She is the author of three chapbooks, Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in October 2026.
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I’d add to my other comment on Penelope Moffet’s excellent poem, these words from Rose Mary Boehm’s poem We the People:
Ignorance does not absolve
us from the burden of accounting
when someone asks one day
-and where were you?
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thank you, Jim!
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Today, I seem to be blocked sending anyone responding on Vox my likes. There are many.
I live in the Twin Cities, and took part at the periphery of the protests of the George Floyd murder. There’s a telling photograph I took at the memorial. I led a discussion of the link between photography and justice using that photo. People at the site seemed in shock, by then. Of course, there was some justice for GF later, though he was dead.
As to the usefulness of protests. They may have minimal effect on those many who refuse to change their minds or their behavior. What they have done for me, and others I know, is to help our own mental health. They are an antidote to a sense of helplessness. The poem asserts that too, amidst its questions of efficacy.
Just yesterday, my cousin Linda, who lives in another middle class part of Saint Paul, said ICE was pounding on her door. She never answered. She’s a musician. She fears she may have played at a benefit at some point that now evokes ICE. She has no idea. Protest or not, they may one day knock on your door.
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That’s so chilling, Jim.
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Eva and I live in Pittsburgh and are politically active. We’ve discussed what we should do if ICE pounds on our door or if one of us is arrested. I think in this perilous times, we need to be prepared.
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Thank you all for your comments. It was Michael’s republication of an interview with Joan Baez over a month ago that got me started on this poem. That sentence of hers, “Carry your light out into the shitstorm,” hung about in my brain until, on an afternoon when I thought I had nothing to write, I sat down and wrote this. ~ We all do what we can do when we can do it. Hard to hold onto that thought right now, when I keep seeing that video of Renee Good, filmed by the ICE agent who would kill her, of her saying to him with a face that looks very open and accepting, “I’m not mad at you, dude.”
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Can’t march but I can sit on a busy corner with others and hold a sign. And I can join other poets to read our protest poems to maintain our sanity and know we are not alone.
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Thank you Penelope & Michael–we need one another on paper and in the streets, yet again!
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I’m happy to report that in Pittsburgh we have a large activist community that protests in various ways — demonstrations, speakers, letter writing, websites. I’m getting too old to march in the icy streets, but Eva and I participate in other ways.
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We can’t all do everything. I do the marches when I can. No snow in Long Beach, but unfortunately we do have ICE.
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I think protests are important because they are a communal light carrying those extended “gimme-an-F” roots on marching First-Amendment feet. But deeper still is that we protest because we can and while we can so that we indeed always can.
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Exactly! Thanks, Matt.
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“So that we always can.” Powerful
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This poem opens a memory (and a constant fear) for me: we in Europe were so angry too at the time and grateful for Joan Baez, Bob Dylan of course, and so many more singers and groups who took on the baton. And now one feels frustrated and helpless – not only has nothing changed, but things got much, much worse. Once the war was aimed at foreign countries, now it’s aimed both outward and inward. And yet, as Penelope writes: “[…] believe / the PEACE I wrote in foot-high / multi-colored chalk pastels on cardboard / carries light.”
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Yes, America is in a dark time, similar to what’s happened in other countries in the past: Germany, Argentina, Chile…
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A very sweet and true poem about us all (isn’t it?) We discovered the reason We were there, Sharon and I, at our first roadside protest with a thousand others almost immediately. All the incidentals of the poem were “present” as well. But it was the feeling of sanity that has been so lacking in our recent lives. It was about feeling good again for the world, a kind of joyful containment of despair. We’ll be out there again for the next one, and the next until somehow this comes to an end and we learn to save ourselves.
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Thanks, Sean. I’ve been to many protests over the last 50 years. I’m not sure whether they’ve had any effect on the government’s abuses of power, but at least the protests made me feel as if I’m doing something, and it’s important that our voices be heard. Perhaps now, with millions of people out on the streets protesting ICE, we’ll see change.
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