PLATFORM: People’s Park, Autumn 2022, Part 2

This is article is the second in a series; follow this link to read part 1.

Editor’s note: In the fall of 2022, Helen Holland Bronston spent time at the (in)famous People’s Park in Berkeley, California. In an earlier article, she discussed the history of the park and the controversy over plans to redevelop it into housing for students and the formerly homeless. Here, she presents a prose poem inspired by her time in the park, along with photographs that she took of current conditions.

When I am most open to the world, I rely on my heart and senses as much as my rational mind to guide my interest. I cannot comprehend the world in all its complexity, from my limited point of view, nor can I organize it into categories or explain it without doing some damage. When tragedy and hope collide, like at People’s Park, I must make room for things indescribable and unknown, at least in the way I document my perceptions. If I am trying to tell a story or design a space, poetry can sometimes help me to find the way forward.

Poetry is a powerful adjunct to operationally focused, design-forward thinking, because it encourages hop-scotched connections, as well as emotional and physical discovery. The experience of poetry flickers between the world and the page, like a photograph, highlighting certain elements, hinting at others, and bringing unexpected things together. Poetry challenges my rational explanations, which seek to define and simplify, by maintaining a connection to the fullness and broadness of meaning and experience. Its open incompleteness and ambiguity are virtues, shining light and opening doors.

Living is a gerund:

we do it in process.

People’s Park is a gerund:

a place of maybe but not yet

always coming

unless it’s gone.

Take a walk and look around

People’s Park is a doing.

Bake a birthday cake

for a woman living on the street

lower it to her, candles lit, from your window.

Plant a collard seed

watch a collard-copia spread

so much that no one can use it all.

You can eat this.

Build a library in a shed

or spread books on a stump

words to make sense of a night’s sudden devastation.

Here’s a tarot card, a playing card, a birthday card, a shoe.

Bring a hosepipe, a snake

outdoor shower and water for the camp

piss for the toilets, sweat and tears.

I came across the United States from Maine, with my ukulele.

Outside a Walmart in Nevada the manager told me the customers

felt threatened by me and my uke

this little girl from Maine

long hair, sweet smile and patterned dress

my wary eye.

The Park gives its blessings, the park provides.

I haven’t needed to leave the park for anything in the two weeks I’ve been here.

She’s moved on now, after a rest

We all need a rest sometimes

Every place has a history

Some places make it more visible

and today more urgent.

Some places point to the future.

We need places where our history comes into focus

Maybe with the right lens it can burn a hole in our present.

A redwood stood here, its shade was so wide, so wide, and looking up was a revelation.

The stars in its needles, the tents below, the boy in the branches who I fed all through his months of perching.

Another day:

There’s somebody here taking pictures! There’s somebody taking pictures!

That’s the right alert, the warning that an outsider – a journalist maybe, or a cop - has come to take advantage, steal your soul, make you a spectacle for pity tourism, or fix your presence in place and time.

I’m wary, respectful, but I need you to see this place.

The woman from Maine told me about the man in the corner of the park who was talking to himself. He just needed a place to be for a while, without the pressure to behave, a respite, a detour, a better home than the dirty roads.

A woman from Arizona was tall and blonde, with a whisper of something in her stance like a friend I once had who asked too much of me and needed more.

Long grey coat, stovepipe pants, rouge, fine lips, finer nose, and hunger thin, so far from home.

I saved up, left Arizona, with an escape plan,

I’d get to San Francisco, find a shelter, find a place to be.

Being’s not so easy when you are from Arizona and you’re like me.

It’s better to be on the street, or in the shelter,

looking for a different future from one

where I die as someone I’m not or much too soon.

I gave her my number, as I’d come awfully close to her life myself

She hasn’t called, seems very independent

I hope she’s alright.

Arizona was just visiting, walking through the park, like it’s the promised land, the possible place, the legend of goodness and openness.

She’d heard about it

People’s Park with its broken and abused but living people.

See the life coming back among the wreckage

You like post-apocalyptic fantasies?

Here’s one, close at hand.

But apocalypse in this world is everywhere and now

And now and now again

Until

we

stop.

Are you a friend?

It’s a shame. It will never be the way it was.

Every flavor of young hopefulness

and every spring of hard wisdom

from the couple of aged hippies who perch on the log

of communities and caring

and - please! - stringing out the hurt of every other thing out there.

Here for a time or a beat it can be better, for us all, for each of us, for a little while.

You’ll need practical skills

like how to build a treehouse, work a drill, move a log, plant vegetables, build a yurt, keep dry

maybe things you learned in the army.

It’s a war out here, with winter coming

Bring your mandolin, too.

How do you make a place of open goodness – at all – but especially in a city under so many demands and commands and make the place last for always?

This is a new church, polity, science, and philosophy.

I’m no poet and I’m just a little bit lost

but I find I am better here

where at least this hope is expressed.

Closer to nothing and closer to everything.

The University wants its land

the Regents want their campus free of conflict

the city is too many people all at once

and they all want something so much they can’t see what they’ve got.

I want some justice and some peace and I find them here.

There is a microdot of freedom on Berkeley’s campus, set in the concrete in front of Sproul Hall

It reads—I paraphrase—

this is a place under no dominion,

not even yours

let no law prohibit anything here

But this unsurveiled dot is too small for real freedom

and symbolism only gets you so far when bodies won’t fit

and who says nobody is watching?

Plant a radio station, 20 meters tall, and 10 cm across, let it broadcast, a beacon of the only hopeful place on the planet.

Plant a slender sapling and watch it spread, over-conquer hatred with loving shade.

Dive into this freedom and you’ll crack your head on the pavement.

By the dot

Dark beneath a blank colonnade

Waits a long history of achievement, protest and joy

It seeps invisibly from the bricks

Here a piano waits for hands that play a new music.

It dreams:

People’s Park Babyyy

Every city, every institution, every state, needs a thorn that tells the city, the institution, and the state they are not enough, goading them to be better, demanding alternatives, even if the new way is always put off.