I love the way water balloon throwers spot a hot hypocrisy
That needs drenching, how they hang from windows
Aiming their arguments at the longwinded,
Schoolyard bullies or university presidents or poets.
I love the way the water balloon throwers want
To soak and stun the wet truth into someone who needs
A waking up. I believe in the nobility of the water
Balloon throwers, how they can storm a situation, turning
Grown-up chaos into orderly satire, like the brigade
In my old apartment building, our water balloon religion,
An Upper West Side sect, I had been baptized in.
How we learned water pressure torture tactics
One hot summer while our non-violent Fathers shook
Frozen drinks to Santana in their Women’s Rights t shirts,
And our mothers dutifully cooked hippie food
In the kitchen, scolding us not to hit our brothers.
I want to say there is a kind of excellence to the water
Balloon thrower who douses the most unaware
And tragically hip grown-up sneaking off from the party
With the babysitter because he wants to forget just how
Crazy the man’s world can be. I want to say something
Condescending to those who take themselves this seriously,
To those who shun the water balloon thrower, for it is the water
Balloon thrower who is willing to get wet, letting
The revolution come water balloon by water balloon, hurled, red or blue.
That’s why we have to catch what they have, however precarious,
Ready to burst, we have to let that ammunition be
Our truth, our hydrogen-oxygen-strength.
Elizabeth Powell’s first book of poems, The Republic of Self, won the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Post Road, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. Her essay “Infidelities” appeared in My Mother Married Your Father, an anthology of essays on step-families, published by WW Norton. She teaches at the University of Vermont, and is poetry editor of Green Mountains Review.
*Photo courtesy of aithom2.