Free Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy Page B

cities as monuments.
    The Tower is ugly as General Motors, as public housing,
    as the twin piles of the World Trade Center,
    tallest, biggest and menacing as fins on an automobile,
    horns on a Minotaur programmed to kill.
    The weight of the Tower is in me. Can I ever straighten?
    You trained me in passivity to lay for you like a doped hen.
    You bounce your gabble off the sky to pierce our brains.
    Your loudspeakers from every television and classroom
    and your transistors grafted onto my nerves at birth
    shout you are impregnable and righteous forever.
    But any structure can be overthrown.
    London Bridge with the woman built into the base
    as sacrifice is coming down.
    The Tower will fall if we pull together.
    Then the Tower reversed, symbol of tyranny and oppression,
    shall not be set upright.
    We are not turning things over merely
    but we will lay the Tower on its side.
    We will make it a communal longhouse.

THAT WHICH OPPOSES THE OVERTHROWING OF THE TOWER:
The nine of cups
    Not fat, not gross, just well fed and hefty he sits before what’s his,
    the owner, the ultimate consumer, the overlord.
    No human kidneys can pump nine cups of wine through
    but that’s missing the point of having: possession is power
    whether he owns apartment houses or herds of prime beef
    or women’s soft hands or the phone lines or the right to kill
    or pieces of paper that channel men’s working hours.
    He is not malcontent. He has that huge high-colored
    healthy face you see on executives just massaged.
    He eats lobster, he drinks aged scotch, he buys pretty women.
    He buys men who write about how he is a servant of circumstance.
    He buys armies to shoot peasants squatting on his oil.
    He is your landlord: he shuts off the heat and the light and the water,
    he shuts off air, he shuts off growth, he shuts off your sex.
    He buys men who know geology for him, he buys men who count stars,
    he buys women who paint their best dreams all over his ceiling.
    He buys giants who grow for him and dwarfs who shrink
    and he eats them all, he eats, he eats well,
    he eats and twenty Bolivians starve, a division of labor.
    You are in his cup, you float like an icecube, you sink like an onion.
    Guilt is the training of his servants that we may serve harder.
    His priests sell us penance for his guilt,
    his psychiatrists whip our parents through our cold bowels,
    his explainers drone of human nature and the human condition.
    He is squatting on our heads laughing. He belches with health.
    He feels so very good he rewards us with TV sets
    which depict each one of us his servants sitting
    just as fat and proud and ready to stomp
    in front of the pile of tin cans we call our castle.
    On the six o’clock news the Enemy attacks.
    Then our landlord spares no expense to defend us,
    for the hungry out there want to steal our TV sets.
    He raises our taxes one hundred per cent
    and sells us weapons and sends us out to fight.
    We fight and we die, for god, country and the dollar
    and then we come back home
    and he raises the rent.

THE INFLUENCE PASSING:
The knight of swords
    I was a weapon. I brandished myself, I was used in the air.
    We rushed in waves at the Tower and were hurtled back.
    Because we were right, should we not win?
    When you know that in the foreign and domestic colonies
    people are dying of hunger, of napalm, of gas, of rats, of racism,
    dying and dying each death is a drop of blood falling
    all night on your forehead, each death is a nail tapped in.
    It is participation in murder
    to sit one moment longer at the key punch.
    It is guilt by association to raise your hand in class.
    It is being an accomplice to take a job in the lab.
    Buying a car, you pay for a fragmentation bomb.
    If you are not fighting, are you not supporting?
    If you saw the children starving in Brazil, would you wait
    the five minutes that is five more bodies bloating?
    If you saw the children burning in the bombed villages of Laos
    would you have another coffee and eat the jelly