Who's Naïve?

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A young woman said to me
you guys in the sixties were so
naïve. How could you ever believe
there would be a revolution?

Oh, child of the oughts, did you
�ever believe Wall Street would
�turn out to be a sham, stocks
�made of piffle and hype?

Did you ever believe General
�Motors would come to tax
�payers cup in hand begging
�not to go out of business?

Did you ever believe we would
�go to war on a lie? That one
�president could fuck up every
�thing standing in just eight years?

That we would elect an African
�American president? That in some
�states, lesbians and gays could marry?
�That greed might go out of style?

What I’ve learned on my hard
�scrabble way is that nothing remains
�but trouble and love and opportunity
�we can make to change what needs it.

Marge Piercy is the author of Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken, 2007). Her most recent novel is Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (New York: William Morrow, 2005) and her newest book of poetry is The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2006).

Copyright © 2009 Marge Piercy.
Reprinted with permission.