Image Credit: Laura Hershey website
While researching for the Tramway's Unlimited Festival: What? programme, I was watching a video by Julia Watts Belser, an academic recommended to me by Claire Cunningham. In it she read the poem "A Day" by the writer, poet, activist and consultant, Laura Hershey. I loved it. And I loved the future that it imagined. A future without the need for educating or redressing imbalances, because it's already done.
Shared with permission.
From In the Way, 1992
"A Day"
By Laura Hershey
A day, Robin.
Just one single day out of the future
we hope that we are building.
That’s what I’d give you, Robin,
give us both, if I could.
Let’s make it a Saturday, and let’s
arrange to be in the same state
when it happens. One day; our day.
A morning in thick down, embroidered blue, brown,
like our eyes opening.
A morning waking slowly—taking our time
to get into our chairs, and get the motors going
--not urgently,
with no demonstrations to prepare for,
because justice demonstrates itself these days;
no meetings,
which have mostly been replaced
by simple understanding;
not even a conference to attend,
because issues like caregiver abuse
and work disincentives
were settled long ago.
I’d give us
a quiet afternoon among trees, Robin,
our talk touching on cloud-shapes, goddesses,
sit-skiing and song—
not on grantwriting, boards of directors,
pending legislation, mandatory access—
because in our rich, related memories,
we won.
I’d give us a monument:
the words we helped to write—
now carved in granite!
Perhaps we’d go to see it, riding downtown in a city bus
that we don’t have to commandeer.
Or we’d take poles to a mountain river.
Fish surface as rain begins to fall. Huddled together
In the rain, we draw out enough rainbow
To satisfy two
stomachs and two clear minds.
Robin, the sun moves across the sky like this every day.
Watch it with me this one day.
Watch it settle into the Rockies.
And with this clear gold view
of the whole city, let’s plan our evening.
I want to give us a night on the town—
yeah a night on the town!
All the hot spots and the spots
we’ll heat up.
The full moon glides us
through doors opening wide to roomy tables
and rose-shaded drinks.
Large level floors rock with our dancing.
Lines form to ask for the next one
and the next one and the next one and all night long
we don’t educate anybody
because
that was taken care of in the last generation.
Returning home just before star-fade,
we might think into the past. We might wonder
how we carried our campaigns
into every hour;
how we poured effort, like water
down the dry throats of our sisters and brothers,
then pumped a little more
for ourselves.
And the deeper wonder:
how in the flying noise of the days we remember living,
we came
to know each other.
