Tom and Paul went downtown to the protest yesterday, which was huge (for Portland) but very peaceful. I would have gone too, except that Paul had bread in the oven and I'm softhearted. However, it's looking less and less like we'll go up to Guilford. I'm reading that roads will be closed, and the whole thing seems increasingly mysterious and ominous.

Lord.

I need to stop fretting about the monster and return to the here-and-now: I'll try to get to my yoga class this morning.At some point James will call with a Chicago update. I finished an editing project yesterday and hope to finish a second today. Some insect is eating my green beans and they look terrible. We got a speck of rain yesterday. Paul made a really good batch of ciabatta. I'm behind on my Rilke copying project. Iris are beautiful in gardens around the neighborhood. Bluejays were patrolling the lilac outside my bedroom window and screeching at Ruckus through the screen.

The following poem is by no means straightforward memoir, and the speaker is not a replica of me. Nonetheless, there are moments when both overlap.

Quaker Ladies

Dawn Potter

i

They had soft, wrinkled hands, those tender Friends.

From their perch on the facing bench,

they rested their dim eyes on hippie mamas

layered in ponchos and peace signs, on bearded professors

breathing noisily in the yogic manner, on bored teenagers

scratching at bits of loose paint on the seatbacks.

Crossing their swollen ankles, blinking like tired cats in sunshine,

the ladies smoothed their navy-blue skirts over their sensible laps.

Now and again, as the tongue-tied hour unrolled,

they emitted a modest snore.

But afterward, amid battered chairs and short stacks

of Chips Ahoy and plastic cups of tea,

while the hippie mamas shrilled No Nukes songs

and plotted vegetarian potlucks,

a lady might take one of us small ones aside and chide gently,

“Thee mustn’t run upstairs during First Day School.

Thee mustn’t shout in the burial ground during Meeting.”

In the same moment she would reach out for our grubby hands

and bunch them up between both of hers,

a shy apology for her humble, dogged, civilizing mission.

We needed to learn how to behave,

so at little parties our Friends would let us melt slivers

of American cheese on saltines in their tiny old-fashioned gas ovens

while they timidly discussed the world of the infidels.

“That Rush Limbaugh on the radio,” a lady whispered to me

when I was eight and she was eighty,

“I don’t think he is a nice man.”

I had no idea who Rush Limbaugh was,

but I nodded wisely,

until the saltines starting burning up in the oven.

Quickly we snatched out the remains and tipped them 

into the sink, and then we giggled a little at our incompetence.

Soon enough, someone else would smell disaster.

ii

In the old days,

my mother’s days,

the seas were chock-full of peaceniks—

hippie Friends canoeing into submarine

christening ceremonies and waving

Save Our Planet signs until the Coast Guard

tipped them into the bay.

Meanwhile, their kids lurked at home with an elderly

stepdad. While he napped we played Space Invaders

on the den TV and snitched roaches out of parental ashtrays.

Perhaps that’s when the evil slipped in---

during those afternoons of gleeful selfishness.

Because now, when a jerk corners me at the counter,

strutting and opining—oh, Lord, how he opines

[“Him and myself go way back.”

“That’s a girl who knows how to have a good time.”]

—the fact is

I want to kill him.

I peer through the store window.

Outside, the sun flings heat at the battered sidewalk,

and two men in hard hats stand beside a yawning hole.

Nothing in that still-life seems willing to rescue me

from my machinations.

How could a good Quaker baby, brought up to eat

soybean casseroles and vote for Ralph Nader, 

nurture the hate that gnaws at me now—

now that I’m as dried out as the heaps

of road dirt humped beside this intersection?

I’ve reached the age when most of my ilk

have lapsed into a do-gooder’s torpor,

serving up Christmas dinner for the homeless,

crooning the oldies at nursing homes,

penning sweet poems about spiders.

Instead, I’m considering the pleasures of shoving

this maggoty customer into an asphalt chasm,

stealing a backhoe, and burying him alive.

Peaceniks are always washing their hands.

William Penn owned twelve slaves.

Put that in your pipe, Mother,

and try not to choke.

[a portion of this poem appeared in Balancing Act II: An Anthology of Poems by 50 Maine Women (Littoral Books, 2019)]