Sonia Sanchez organizes grandmothers
to occupy army recruitment center

Defiant Trespass
by Barbara Lightner

Can’t sit down
     on the rocking chair porch
          of the is,
bad air disturbing your ease,
     old women,
          sending you into the center
where they hold the big cigar.

Cigar’s miasma
          fills the swamp
of a fetid finale,
     circular self satisfactions
rung ’round by the law
          they’ve done in.

Take your lesson:
          the cockatoo dies
               outside of her cage;
Prometheus high in the crags
               had his liver pecked out
                    for trying and trespass;
Eve didn’t make it ‘gainst
          the warlords of patriarch deeds.
And for you?
          No bird sings.

Defiant trespass,
     the charge
          brought in law;
     the charge
          waged for peace,
grandmothers resisting.

Defiant Trespass — Barbara Lightner

Barbara Lightner is a 73-year old shameless agitator who began writing poetry in law school to escape the intolerable burden of death by law. She grew up in rural Tennessee among sharecroppers and cotton magnates and lived among killer whales and dolphins when on an island in Puget Sound. She taught Creative Writing at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon WA. She currently lives in Wisconsin where she owned and operated a 50-cow dairy farm; opened up and ran the Red Wheelbarrows Bookshop; and tried for political office where she failed miserably. The Madison WI Equal Opportunities Commission granted her its 20th Anniversary Award for Community Organizing in the Women’s Community. She has been known to write satire and parody.