Anne Waldman: Arrested

I remember being arrested at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, what I was wearing: a red & white Hawai'ian shirt, white straw hat with plaid ribbon, white pants with a gentle crease down the front.

I remember the guards in their black "action" suits. I remember thinking they are "just boys."

I remember the guards with their megaphones giving a countdown as we squatted on the Rocky Flats property. "You have ten minutes to evacuate the premises. . . . you have nine minutes . . . you have eight minutes ..." & so on.

I remember what a beautiful day it was how passive the mountains looked, how majestic.

I remember thinking "all this could disappear."

I remember thinking I was six years old when this place was built, how it cost something like 250 million dollars.

How the word "trigger" is a funny word, the name for a horse, for a gun, not a bomb.

I remember thinking the word "button" was also a funny word to use. I remember the ten-pound plutonium "buttons" extracted from fuel rods were shipped to Rocky Flats on trains.

I remembered "Tender Buttons" from Gertrude Stein.

I remember we meditated on the train tracks & tried to stop the shipments of plutonium.

I remember trying to sound intelligent when the microphone was shoved in my face and not just singing "We Shall Overcome."

I remember thinking it's hard to visualize plutonium. Something that is invisible and doesn't exist in nature. I remembered that it comes from uranium.

I remember trying to visualize bombarding uranium with neutrons. I remember trying to visualize the chart of elements as it hung on my high school wall while riding in the bus to the courthouse in Golden.

I remember being with Allen Ginsberg in Chicago during the Chicago Seven trials, I remember thinking that I would demonstrate with him anywhere in the world.

I remember being with Allen Ginsberg at a gay rights benefit in Aspen, how we were in a bathroom right before the reading and he needed to inject the needle with insulin into his arm.

I remember Allen's good cheer on the bus to be booked in Golden, also his gentle anger.

I remember how I went and xeroxed colored paper with mantras on them to hand out at the demonstrations in Chicago. We went to the park. It was getting dark. I remember a lot of people had megaphones. I remember I started chanting "Om Aing Gring Cling Chamunda Yeh Vijaya" into a megaphone.

I remember how we chanted mantras then & we are chanting mantras now and we will keep chanting mantras for the rest of our lives.

I remember thinking as we rode the bus to Golden that it was a particular kind of bus, reserved for prisoners or mental patients.

I remember making a huge circle of human bodies for miles & miles around Rocky Flats.

I remember when I was pregnant I stayed away.

I remember seeing the deformed calf born without hair at the stable where we would go horseback riding near Rocky Flats.

I remember thinking I would go scatter some of Allen Ginsberg's ashes at Rocky Flats but then I didn't act on that thought.

I remember looking into my son's newborn face & wanting to save him from every possible hurt or damage. I remember thinking that the enemy may be invisible. I was in a rocking chair. I was holding him tightly. It was the middle of the night.