Lynne Barnes "Postcard from the Castro" at "Poets 11" 2016
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2016-10-05

Harvey Milk is smiling out a window in the Castro again,
in a new portrait on the side of his old building —
half-circle smile, head bowed,
looking out through a sliver of sun
onto the sidewalk of his old neighborhood.
He seems to know something we don’t.
Or is his smile just the start of a happy laugh
remembering this gay Mecca is named Eureka Valley?
Maybe he’s simply admiring the beautiful boys
holding hands with such nonchalance
as they sashay past him heading toward
Does Your Mother Know on 18th.
He has the radiance of someone who sees through hate,
from this window on a wall, rainbow flag across his chest,
rainbows fluttering from lamp posts at every corner.
The van Gogh golds and blues of the mural
hang like lodestar above his once open-to-all refuge,
his Castro Camera store, his first openly gay supervisor’s
campaign office, this hippie community center
where I once sat in his old dentist’s chair installed
like a work of beat art in the middle of his shop floor.
I knew him when I did not know who I was.
Looking back on the long journey from then to now:
his holy, disarming comedy silenced
by a deadly-serious, fear–spawned loathing…
yet out of that sudden, bloody silence, a roar —
from Altoona, Pennsylvania, San Antonio, Des Moines.
I have come here on a pilgrimage from the Haight:
I’m alive, I’m in love, I’m in hope, I’m out.
His image shines like a moon over Castro Street again,
but I cannot meet the gaze of his hidden, earthcast eyes.
If I could, I would say:
Thanks, Harvey.
Having a wonderful