Aerial Video At Teachers' Strike - poem I read Friday Evening

I include here the poem I read yesterday at the Distinguished Writer Series Open Mike.  The featured reader for the evening at Emmanuel Presbyterian Church was Josie Emmons Turner. 

Aerial Video At Teacher's Strike

At the video's top, that is me,

a bit of yellow-green.  Screen grab,

print screen, paste into Power Point,

and Save As a Jay-Peg.

This can appear from several positions.

I share on Facebook the photo

from my track phone -

the helicopter up above.

Police motorcycles drove up,

intersection-circled, and parked in a row.

The helicopter circled at the top view

the building which was

the Lynn Funeral Home, the building

and me, the bit of yellow-green.

The bit of yellow green which can appear

from several positions does not know

why police motorcycles

intersection-circled and parked.
It is hours later, when I look at the aerial video

the motorcycles escorted marchers to the rally.

And hours later, Inside, inside, the lady

who had become bent over

with osteoporosis, she walked with a cane.

It was 1985, my mother bent over.

Her funeral was at First Lutheran in 1986.

How the family was long ago in 1985.  My Aunt.

We saw a child outside see many cars

go by with the police escort to the cemetery.

I was walking to the library.  The family.

Ancestry Dot Com.  The 1940 U.S. Census.

For some chance to glimpse

my father.  At the Olympia archive months back

a younger person than my father,

but my father, unmistakeably.

Three photos, my father holds a camera

my father climbs a ladder,

and most clearly,

my father stands beside another man.

At the latest early 1941, for my father

left the pharmacy job at Northern State Hospital

early in 1941.  From a name

in the U.S. Census, from portraits in U.W.

year books, from obituary bios

of the wife of the other man, and the man -

he was a chemist at Northern State Hospital

where he met his wife who graduated

from Sedro-Wooley High School and became

Northern State Hospital's switchboard operator.

She lived nearby.  He was phi-beta-kappa.

An elected official recommended my father

who worked his way through pharmacy school

as a cook for Standard Oil.

From the ladder my father takes a picture.

He takes a picture that is the aerial video.

He takes the aerial video from the sky

of so many marchers in red.

Does anyone see how hard that is?

To walk and walk and have no job?

To walk and walk beyond the jail

that appears on another rim of the video,

and to walk beyond the library – to walk

to Work Force to walk and walk

and have no job?

I walked and walked.