Shared History

I saw you last year, Allen Cohen,
in North Beach at the Cafe Puccini
with Pavarotti music overflowing
from the Jukebox.

I tried to get your attention
but I was too down depressed,
not feeling equal.

You were six years older,
from New York City,
active during the good
community making early years
in Berkeley and the Haight:
dedicated, for our generations,
against all war.

I remember a poetry reading
at the Noe Valley Ministry,
a benefit for the Coalition for Nuclear Free Harbors.
you mentioned Kenneth Patchen
as an early influence,
then used a tape recording
from the Kronos Quartet
to accentuate your poem,
"No More Hiroshima Bombings,
No More Nagasaki Bombings."

I didn't know you well, Allen,
although you and I often talked
a little at a time, many times,
comparing notes on opposing Reagan's wars
and the importance of environmental justice.

You often could be heard counseling a neighbor:
"It is not just our circumstances but the choices
we make about these that matter."

I remember you worked at the Schlock Shop
and would write poetry
about the peoples' fondness for various hats.

You were like an older brother
established already in the good dissent,
one of the better names
in this City near the Bay.

I will carry on
the unfathomable resilience
of a peoples' antiwar poetry,
the growing dialectics of the social poem.
I will not give up
to the abyss of despair,
for longer than a reflective 50 minutes per week.

You wrote a book called "The Reagan Year Poems,"
then, after 9-11-01, edited the anthology,
"An Eye For An Eye Makes the Whole World Blind."

You were right there
across from the second table
at the Cafe Puccini in North Beach
near the Mediterranean like bay
where the fog cool air still smells
of fresh espresso.

You are a history now,
an overflowing history,
a vivid history carried along,
a history affirmed
by even the forgotten
histories, who were ever
enjoined and searching
along with you.

"No More Hiroshima Bombings,
No More Nagasaki Bombings,"
Allen Cohen.

© Larry Ebersole. All rights reserved.

Larry Ebersole is a longtime Bay Area person, active in Seattle with Amnesty International. He works as a counselor and is a volunteer editor with Poets Against the War. His earlier poems appear in "Struggle," "Am Here Forum," "Zambomba," and several poetry editions of the "San Francisco Street Sheet."

Allen Cohen Tributes and Memories
BACK TO ALLEN COHEN POETRY

---

Website created by S.F.Heart ©1997 - 2026 All rights reserved.
All products and company names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.