TEA PARTY

I walk across dead grass toward the courthouse,

the only woman in pink, my tropical OP tee shirt tucked

into low-riding white Bermuda shorts. I feel thirty-five,

not sixty-two, but I’m not much younger than these

docile retirees who cluster on lawn chairs

beneath the big sweeping tree.

I find a small, compact man in a white shirt and jeans.

He has a tight, weathered face and intense blue eyes,

who says I’m poisoned by the mainstream news.

Sun shines on the white gazebo and our host, who stands

at the microphone in a white shirt, black tie, silver-rimmed glasses.

We cast our eyes up to the flag, which I see through the screen of trees, way up high, lying limp beside the Flag of the Republic.

No wind today.

Day jillion of the drought.

Our voices float in the late summer air, pledging allegiance

like we did in school, proclaiming our love for our country,

wishing we could yank it back to a better time, like

a mother rescuing her drowning child.

For we all remember “when” – when we were young,

when we had hope, before wars, before debt, before

young girls kept their babies and got tattoos and

got their tongues pierced, before young men laid on the couch

playing video games, take-out wrappers littering the floor.

We remember sitting down to dinner with

a mother and father, siblings who grumbled about

school and chores but went to school and did their

chores and enlisted in the army because

it was the right thing to do, to serve our country.

But I marched against the war, I took acid

I felt we were changing the world.

We did change the world. 

Now I stand, one foot saluting the flag, the other

running naked through hot summer sand

into a bracing cold ocean . . .

I don’t feel I belong here.  

I’m not one of them.

A line of children – a fife and drum corps – emerges,

boys and girls, seven to fifteen, on time, in tune,

in white leggings and bright white shirts

and bright blue knickers and vests. Black tri-cornered

caps point the way as they weave around the gazebo.

When I realize I’m the only one bopping to the music, 

I hope the colonel next to me doesn’t think I’m

unpatriotic, I move in church too – joy can’t sit still.

A woman nearby, with a fresh crisp hairdo, videotapes

with her cell phone.  I study her earrings, her painted nails.

She smells good.

One of the children drummers, fifteen years old, comes

to the microphone.  He’s going to talk about the Constitution,

he read this summer, down by the river.

Suddenly he’s talking about praying in school, that

this country was founded by Religious Men, in the name

of God, and my feet start carrying me away.  I circumvent

quiet clusters of gray haired men and women, in red, white and blue.

They seem quite comfortable in their lawn chairs.

One more hot, dry summer day.