The Meadow 101 after that, it will not matter what I was called. The voices of so many will come out of hiding and they will embrace some measure of dignity, just as we must embrace our desire to see the day pass without violence or subversion. The oligarchs fear this most—that the will to accede to a vision of compassion and hope is greater than the will to act in habitual violence. Any child knows this; that may be why they are in our lives. And lastly, I will imagine a phosphorous of ideas that address what has been stopped in the name of the oligarchs—and reasonable dialogue will resume even as we differ over what was lost. I take no pride in wanting this return to a semblance of humane discourse; it should have never left but without it, the vacuum is surely filled. The only winner in this election will be us. All of us. I want to close with a poem from the late Vassar Miller. Vassar lived with cerebral palsy and was a deeply religious poet when few around her understood what she was writing. She was an anomaly—and her words are compressed so tight that they exude fire. This sonnet, “Without Ceremony,” is one such fire. We find ourselves where tongues cannot wage war On silence (farther, mystics never flew) But on the common wings of what we are, Borne on the wings of what we bear, toward You, Oh Word, in whom our wordiness dissolves, When we have not a prayer except ourselves. This is the title poem from Vassar’s collection, Wage War on Silence (reprinted in her collected poems If I Had Wheels or Love, Southern Methodist University Press, 1991). And while her poem is clearly a meditation on humility in the face of her God, she does not ask that we accompany her. She simply avows the silence with which each of us struggle. And in so doing affirms
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