My time at Zuccotti Park today, marking a full seven days of my “poetry occupation,” was more dutiful than fervent, as I was feeling spent from all the week’s activities. I lolled around the house until mid-afternoon and then set out walking in the direction of Manhattan, passing through the Botanic Garden, where I saw a number of Hasidic Jewish men in their amazing circular fur hats, presumably donned in honor of Sukkot. They looked rather beautiful but also uncomfortably warm under balmy, sunny skies. I ended up on the R train and made it to lower Manhattan, where the crowds around the occupation site, especially on the Broadway side of the park, seemed thicker than ever. They also seemed more racially mixed. I had the sense that more and more people are deciding that Zuccotti Park is the place to publicize whatever cause they hold most dear. I saw a sign for information about political prisoner Sundiata Acoli, an information table devoted to “full citizenship rights for immigrants,” a middle-aged couple with a sign about the need for better medical coverage for people with kidney disease. I positioned myself on Broadway next to a man who had something to say about the spiritual quest and was holding up a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. There I began to preach my own gospel by reading some poems from Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon, 2005).  The cacophony was such that I soon found myself almost shouting my way through “On the Loss of Energy (and Other Things),” “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” “Poem about Police Violence,” and finally the poem that got the poet into so much trouble, written in response to the 1982 massacres of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps, “Notes towards Home.” I dedicated that final reading to my poet-friend Bea Gates, who called from Maine earlier in the day and told me how itchy she was to get down to the city and participate in Occupy Wall Street. “Go there and read a poem for me,” was her request. So I did.

I don’t think what I read today got much of a “hearing,” although as usual a few passersby scrutinized the book cover with interest to see who the writer was, and one black man of mature years looked me in the eye and said, “That’s a great poet” on his way into the park. I’d realized on the train that, rather than choosing my readings at random, it was important to pick poems that would sound relatively okay in my white-voiced reading; some of my favorites–for example, “Getting Down to Get Over,” with its kaleidoscopic, epic vision of b(B)lack women’s  everyday heroism–seemed to me too raw, too daring in their exposure of abjection, to risk dissemination in a format where only part of the story might get through, or where the gap between my visible identity and the voice of the work might invite misunderstanding about my intentions. I do wish I’d read “Cameo No. 2” (“George Washington/somebody want me to think he bad….the father of this country/stocked/by declarations at the auction block”); Jordan in take-no-prisoners mode before the absurdities and pretensions of white-mindedness is always refreshing.

Afternoon was waning and I walked homewards over the Brooklyn Bridge, fortunate to see the windows of DUMBO highrises burning dangerously, thrillingly, with the last reflected light. As I got to the crest of the bridge, the sun was almost touching the horizon; I caught accidentally, with one turn of the head, the glorious sight of the rosy harbor and tall-masted ships that all the tourists had paid good money to be able to point their cameras at.  (There are so many of them on a fine day like today that they make it as hard to negotiate the bridge’s walkway as it is to thread one’s way down Broadway in the press of gawkers out to see the history that’s being made at Zuccotti Park.)  And it occurred to me that if I were Satan and if I had it in mind to tempt anyone–say, Mayor Bloomberg–the way Christ was tempted, I would not take him to the top of the Empire State Building, or to that hideous Freedom Tower. I would take him to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge on a clear, still autumn day, with a layer of high flat clouds covering half of the sky, and light ruling the other half. “All this can be yours,” I would tell him.

Did you know that in New York people can get arrested for “loitering with masks”? That was one of the charges against some of the demonstrators who marched on Times Square yesterday. Another group got arrested for trying to close their accounts at a Citibank branch in Greenwich Village.