Jorie Graham / Demonstration

landing on the ranking

branch. Staring

at me. Felt

that. It was all

flowing now. I made

my way to where I was to join

the others. The others

were all already

there. There was

chanting, here were orders, the instructions were

loud. Impatience

made itself at home

in all these distances of shoulders, of

hands. Everyone sang. I cld hear its

shuddering. Impatience, I sd,

stop now while you

can. It’s a big flock. We’re entering

the network. There’s smoke. The air

all around me knows

not to hold anything

for long. Bc it is this unison of

breath, this unison of

mind the big wind is

after. The crows

watch. More & more gather in

the canopy. Where

shall we meet up

afterwards, someone

cried out. Here. Exactly

here, was the answer.

I listen to the day.

I remember the rule of law, the rule

of the two-second advantage,

it sounds like endings,

a vacancy expecting re-

velation, re-

evaluation, expecting

to become a river of selves, of dis-

appearing selves, us all 

stepping again now into the self-erasing

crowd, the air

full of receipts, of tips, of signals by which

we are expecting to be

changed. It glides. It carries

me. Ever more alive. I made sure

I never had to see

the horizon

again I think—I did—I did it

voluntarily, I think I did it

voluntarily, it is

so dry this

chant into which we’re

disappearing, the killing

continues but now we call it

decay, or is it delay,

did I love myself

too much or too

little, I think I was lied

to, I am not what I

look like

in this growing

crowd, when I think back

to the screen where I was singled out where I was

called,

I didn’t look like

me, I had been searching there

for what the

questions are, what

the question

is—is there

a question—the chanting gets louder

as we approach, it sounds just like

answers but what was

the question. I

remember asking those

around me. I think one sd

it’s a game, it’s a theory, but

just then everything

you’ve read about

for all these years

began. Right then. As if it were planned. As if we were

expected. It has not ceased since.

If you can hear me there,

if this reaches you,

forgive us,

we did not know who we were.

Photo credit: Dino Ignani

Jorie Graham is the author of sixteen collections of poems. Her poetry has been widely translated and has received numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize (UK), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the International Nonino Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She lives in Massachusetts and is the Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric Emerita at Harvard University.

Norwegian Authors Climate Campaign thanks author Jorie Graham for allowing us to republish her poem, Demonstration.

This poem and others can be found in Jorie Grahams new collection «Killing spree«.