Today, my experience of direct democracy started with a trip to Harlem, where I joined a goodly crowd of people at the “Stop Stop & Frisk” rally outside the Harlem State Office Building, followed by a march across 125th Street to the 28th police precinct on 123rd. Exemplary of the fascinating alliances that are being forged just now, the long overdue protest was apparently sponsored by an unlikely coalition of clergy and members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. After remarks by Cornel West which I had a hard time hearing via the “people’s mic” procedure, as a group of protesters prepared to commit civil disobedience, I left the precinct to travel downtown for my scheduled meet-up with writer Eric Darton at Zuccotti Park. I later heard on WNYC that about 30 people had been arrested at the precinct.

The NYPD’s notorious policy of arbitrarily stopping and searching thousands and thousands of people, predominantly Black and Latino youth, as they peaceably attempt to go about their business, has been an open scandal in the city for a number of years. Among my most memorable impressions from the rally are the accounts by several young men of color of their experiences with this policy. One speaker described being forced to dance for the amusement of an officer; another said that his decision to commit civil disobedience today came not as a result of apprehension that he himself might be detained again, but “because I don’t want the young people I teach to have to go through this, and I don’t want any mother to have to raise her children thinking this is what they’re going to have to face.” My favorite slogan was not the rather obvious “Cease and desist/stop stop & frisk,” but the feisty, “From Up against the wall! to All up in their faces!” (Later in the evening I was still carrying my sign from the rally when I stopped to buy a bottle of wine at a liquor store in Park Slope; the twenty-something clerk amazed me by expressing his support: “Even for me as a white person, it’s ridiculous–I got stopped on my bicycle, just because of where I live. They said some people on bicycles were committing crimes, and I’m like, well, but I wasn’t doing anything!”)

When I got out of the A train at Chambers Street, I spotted a bathroom–aka a Starbucks–and thought I should take advantage, but the line was so long that I really had to hustle to get down to the park by 3. After I’d stood at Broadway and Liberty for a few minutes, Pam McAllister, an old peace movement buddy, showed up and said she’d brought poetry to read. Shortly after that, Eric arrived, and we made our way into the interior of the park, a short ways downhill from the OWS library and press table. Although the place was packed, we found a planter with a low wall around it that was temporarily free of occupying bodies, and decided to use it as our dais.  I climbed up and began our reading with a poem from Mahmoud Darwish’s If I Were Another, one from the cycle “Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene ,” and Eric followed that with a ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali that, like Darwish’s poem, invokes Lorca. Pam read a wonderful poem by the Grenadian poet Merle Collins, spoken in the voice of a democratic “we” explaining to the rulers its reasons for exercising its powers of expression and action: not in reaction to the repressive forces of illegitimate authority, but because it is in our nature, just as it is in the nature of all earthly things to raise their voices. I read Darwish’s “Rubaiyat” (“I see what I want of blood: I have seen the murdered/address the murderer who bullet-lit his heart: From now on/you shall remember only me”); Eric read Frost’s “Mending Wall”; and both Pam and I read poems by Wislawa Szymborska. In between, we had some conversation with a member of the Occupation who told us he was helping out with logistics, and incidentally that he had a Navy background (he’d done demolition work). I was interviewed about my reasons for coming to the park by a couple of young Asian women who explained they were language students, and asked to record my remarks so that they could  play them back and decipher what they might have missed the first time around. There was a fanfare as a large group of Verizon Communications workers, embroiled in labor contract negotiations and protesting the company’s greed in the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, arrived and marched around the park’s periphery. Much to my satisfaction, Eric closed out the reading with a poem by my old teaching colleague and Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighbor Mervyn Taylor, from his 1999 collection The Goat.