Anna

They swarmed around her
with their leather and beards,
their flags and videocameras,
and she being the courageous one
that she is
stepped into the challenge
of twenty grown men crowding around a woman
just to interrogate and mock
because she felt called to stand in that space
unapologetically
as the daughter of former military personnel,
as a chaplain,
as a christian (doing something christ-like),
with her bare-shoulders and berkeley blue
because she being the ever-attentive student
that she is
has learned the art of conversation
and the virtue of confrontation even when
it rips your guts out and leaves you
sobbing in the chest of your best friend.

And I stood fifteen feet away,
watching the one with the video-camera
trying to get a response with his foul mouth,
referencing her breasts and her ass,
as if they had anything to do with the subject matter
at hand. I stood fifteen feet away
between a lunge and a prayer
between a rock and a river
occupying the paradox of peace activism:
wanting to love and protect for the good of the thing
but not compromise the good of all things in the process.

Twenty minutes later a man gets on the podium
to address all these marines and vets and patriotic protestors.
He tells them about his dead son who was a soldier
in Iraq, who died protecting this beloved country,
who died for love of a thing. And I thought back
twenty minutes prior, about the in-between space,
about wanting to take that man's camera and break it on his face
for fucking with my friend,
and something in me shifts--I see I'm not above it
nor below it
nor outside of it
whatever "it" may be.