The Sixties--1960 Poem by Sandy Fulton

1960
The Sixties arrived at midnight.
We started at the Officers' Club
but the Big Band beat chased away
those of us under twenty-five.

The crowd I ran with
made our own music.
We called it "folk music"
though some of it was fresh as yesterday
by songwriters whose names we knew,
including ourselves.

The stark modalities seared my heart.
As for the words:
after mesmerizing years of cold war,
suddenly, startlingly, they began to call out
the soul of hope.

In the warm California and Hawaii nights
we gathered guitars
and banjos
and bongos
and penny-whistles
and recorders,
some just tooled up their singing voices,
and went to someone's apartment or BOQ room
until the New Year's dawn,
dodging the hard rain falling,
blowing back the wind,
bricking up the ticky-tacky—
secretly Beatnik naval officers
deliciously aware
of the subversion in our music.

In 1960 some of the best songs
hadn't yet been created
but I was old enough to vote for a President
for the first time,
cast my ballot for Kennedy,
my generation's way of giving the middle finger
to the buttoned-down Fifties,
when only the parodists of MAD
saved us from suicide.