A Poem for the One

We Fought

With our banners raised
High, like flailing flags
Extended arms
Rupturing the sky
Brows soaked in sweat
Tears thick as raindrops
Shoulders, like boulders
Rubbing, close
Like marching men
Wounds gashed, infected
Deep as bomb craters
Anthems, arrhythmic pleas
Like dehydrated hearts 

We meant to occupy

Not bend or bow
Before pellets or pistils
Nor crack or cry
Before bombs or batons
But attack with books,
Veins gorged with verses,
The prose in our palates,
Spitting meter and rhyme

We are sorry

If famished faces offended
If our boots, layered with dirt
Perturbed the sensibility
of Liberty Square
But our troops did not know
Marble, it knew mud
Did not know
Castles, it knew fences 
We knew
Failure, not chances
We knew
Pain, not romances
We knew
Hierarchy, poor circumstances
Not opportunity
      
          not democracy

So we fought
With wits for weapons
We occupied
Like squads in war
And we are not sorry