PUNK POETRY: Songs on a March for Women's Lives by Margaret McCarthy

SONGS ON A MARCH FOR WOMEN’S LIVES   

(a frontline report in the form of a poem)

My baby don’t mess around,
Code Pink Girls know
what happens when you mess around
in Washington D.C. on April 24, 2004, 
don’t mess with us now.
a One, two, three, four!
Code Pink Girls have a routine;
four to a line, 4 – 8 -- 12 –16,
palms up, palms down, 
my baby don’t mess around
until the right-to-lifers break the line
and then the dance really begins,
Code Pink Girls shimmy up, join arms
around the outraged, red faced, bloody fetus 
placard waving young man,
belly to belly with the rage, gently 
dance him back behind police lines.

Hey Ya!  Here we are  –
“Post Menopausal Women Nostalgic For Choice”
marching next to aqua t-shirted “Not In My Lifetime!”
twenty-two year olds.  We’re all here and we won’t go back
We won’t go back
It’s too late to turn back now
I believe I believe 
I’m falling in love
but it’s still my body.

Hey ya!  All together now
Black, white, male, female, old, young, rich, poor,
all in on this one,  all one million of us 
hoofing it, marching, arms linked, shakin’ it  
underneath the bloody posters of fetal remains.

But there was my girlfriend Jane at 45
who really, really wanted that baby, worked for it, desperate
temperature takings and tears every morning 
and finally, “fuck all that, let’s just try” said her husband
and that pregnancy was a miracle
until the amnio gave back “the worst possible result”
in the words of her doctor, “you absolutely must abort” 
as he told her he didn’t perform abortions and couldn’t help her.

So I’m out here shakin’ it like a Polaroid 
for the late term abortions that absolutely no one wants
but that women need to save their lives –
and I know a lot about Polaroid pictures,
I was a photographer’s assistant,
my job to shoot those proofs and shake ‘em for the clients
who made the t-shirts or the caps, the sunglasses, the bobble-headed dolls
that sway, keep watch 
from your car’s back seat.
Shoot that Polaroid 
and shake it – the clientele always in a rush, impatient
for that ghostly image to develop, a few minutes
seemed like nine months —
shoot it, shake it, break down that set! Hey

ya! And sometimes the men we worked with put pornography
in the women’s bathroom, the wall papered
with spread-eagle shots, 
they weren’t used to female photo assistants,
just wanted to have a little fun with us.
I used to wonder for the women in those pictures,
how many pregnancies those splayed shots led to
but abortion was legal then – Hey,
how many Supreme Court Justices
look at porn?  Ya!
My baby don’t mess around 
because he loves me so
he wouldn’t want to hurt me
wouldn’t want my life to end now 
would he?
And fellas, don’t you think it’s cold, really
cold as ice
to make us pay for sex with our lives?

And now I can’t avoid the litmus test,
wondering how every man and woman whom I pass on these streets
election cycles later with a stacked Supreme Court
thinks about abortion.
Because to loathe abortion
might be understandable,
to make a woman pay
with her life or her death
for the sex she’s just had with you
is not.                                                            

And does this all come down to love?
Do you really love me?

Do you really love her?
Your girlfriend or your best friend,
your mistress, wife or lover,
your mother or your sister,

your baby, your daughter
on that first date at the frat house?
I think this is a love song –
how much do you love her?
Do you really love her?

Do you really love me?

--Margaret McCarthy