Jie Tian
“The moment when a feeling enters the body is political.” -Adrienne Rich
Feelings well up in the Women’s March
Feeling mauve, Santa Ana, I grieve for the broken river bank
the homeless an ancient rage
—the thirst to kill the drive to war
Feeling angry at the deceit in the inauguration address—
power to the people
a masquerade disrupting the symphony and California air
Feeling ashamed of our unscrupulous race and pursuits
Feeling dis-eased
there are lies, lies, lies in the human mouth
Feeling an ache for asking again
when shall we ever learn
Feeling wanting to tell the truth, mouth cracked
drought-intolerant
Feeling opened & tender
longing for green rain wisteria sustenance
Feeling partially irresponsible for preferring to retreat to Mount Baldy
comforted by friendly snow intelligent pine
the swirled knots of kindness
Feeling pulled to the streets of Santa Ana
the energy field of feelings the humanly love and struggle
Feeling the intensely worried brown eyes of a handsome young father
the older child sleeping in his arms the infant strapped to his shoulder
clearly feeling an uncertain future
Feeling unrest and agitation
feelings of crisis criss-cross faces signs and hearts
Feeling respect for the devotion to order and peace
Feeling reassured women who marched in the sixties rejoin the march today
in vivid colored clothes and lipsticks and beliefs
Feeling we come from a long history of making public our feelings
Feeling a flash of recognition of a kindred spirit
as a winged couple pass through—
Hope is the thing with feathers
Feeling innocent and trusting again seeing a girl’s smile
and her sign with the bold pink words close to her heart—
BUILD KINDNESS NOT WALLS
Feeling humbled by the clear vision of the young
Feeling a secret conviction that our words can heal our warring worlds
Feeling into dreaming
Feeling into believing
Feeling into dancing
Feeling warmth now in January in genuine California sun and light
Feeling awe— our bodies still blaze like the many colors of dawn
—how we come together how we will go on
Jie Tian is a poet, librarian, ecological artist, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. Her work appears in Spillway, Solo Novo, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Asian American Short Story Writers, and Asian American Playwrights. She is completing her poetry manuscript, Migration, and learning book arts.
Copyright: © 2018 Jie Tian. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
