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If ever they ask you,
“Which side are you on?”
Tell them, plainly,
“I side with the people.”
With the precious ones, all, the integral,
the soft and the fierce, irreplaceable,
the beloved, if only
by God and trees, who were born,
who breathe and survive;
Say I side with those who keep watch,
beneath the bright screaming arc of bombs;
with those who hide in dark doorways
or who through the moonlight flee;
with those who stay and fight,
and with those kept up all night,
by hunger and grief and terror and rage,
by desperate, unruly hope;
who are good and green at the root;
who are more than the worst that they’ve done;
who do their best to love, and still pass on
the hurt in themselves that they hate.
But what
when they take sides ’gainst each other?
The people—against even themselves?
Side with whatever is human in them,
what is fragile and feeling and flesh.
Side with the truth of our stories.
Side with the fact of our pain.
Side with defiant insistence on freedom
Side there again and again.
Side there today and tomorrow.
Side there the rest of your life.
Side there together, until we belong
each one to every other.
If ever they ask you, “Which side are you on?”
Say, “It doesn’t work like that.”
Tell them you side with the people.
And abide where the people are at.