The Sixties--1969 Poem by Sandy Fulton

1969
Sixty-four dollars,
that was all our May wedding and reception cost:
a hippie wedding, deliberate and in-your-face.
I made my mini dress, his dashiki,
we wore beads down to the knees.
Friends and kinfolk came in tailored suits and caftans,
bluejeans and sequined gowns, long hair and crew-cuts.
My matron of honor wore a sweater and plaid skirt.

We'd both been teaching that spring.
We both had savings, other ideas for the fall,
and had the summer to ourselves
on a camping honeymoon
in our VW beetle
with food on the back seat,
tent, pots and pans strapped to the top.

Drove south, then west.
Watched the lunar landing on West Virginia teevee,
explored a cave in Kentucky,
chased an midnight Iowa thunderstorm
followed the lightning of Zeus horizon to horizon,
climbed an ancient sand dune in Nebraska,
froze in the Bighorn Mountains on a starry July night,

got our tent slashed by a Yellowstone bear,
climbed to the spine of North America in Montana,
drank pure drops from the roof of an ice cave on Rainier
(the year before the ice began to shrink and disappear) ,
thrilled to the silence of the moss-hung rain forest,
made love rolling among oxalis on the forest floor,
island-hopped across fjords into British Columbia,

dune-buggied on Jasper glaciers, tasted falling snow in August,
held conversations with chipmunks,
spectated at a twilight tournament of elk,
stared in awe at moose standing in the lakes,
craned our necks to admire shimmering auroras,
marveled at the vast Saskatchewan oceans of wheat,

had a whole campground to ourselves in Manitoba,
where awesome stone monuments like Stonehenge miniatures
made a private castle wall just for us,
canoed through the September silence of Lac du Flambeau,
got blown away in a St. Lawrence gale,
knelt beside life-swarming tidal pools on coastal Maine,
listened to the night song of coyotes in Vermont's White Mountains.

Two weeks too late for Woodstock,
came home to a society ever more broken, polarized,
afraid of the one inevitable destiny of all things:

Change.

The ones in control, unwilling to share a pittance,
were busy in their plush boardroom hells
organizing the born-again bullies
who preached and practiced God's hate.
Phone tappers gathered secret dossiers.
Paranoids, sneaks and spies, agents provocateurs
invented radicals.
Burglars would soon obtain White House sanction
to bash and brutalize a renaissance.

Far from perfect, that renaissance.
Too many silly causes—
rebellion for the hell of it,
excellence confused with elitism,
pointless pursuit of casual drugs, meaningless sex,
mysticism mushing into nonsense,
women still too docile,
Naïve ideologies too white for black folk.

We really believed that All You Need Is Love.

No Age of Aquarius,
yet a time that gave me
more creative freedom,
more desire for justice,
more longing for equality
more dreams of peace
than any other decade in my lifetime.
We opened Pandora's Box and out fluttered hope.