photograph by Elaine Mays titled "Small Commune on Stairs," Haight Street, August 1968
below poem was written for and submitted to Writer Monk February 3, 2026
Hashtags: #twmonk #twmcontest2026 #twmsocialimpact
Contest Theme: My Witness to Change
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Then, Janis Joplin’s vinyl tunes sparked a revolution, Haight-Ashbury, hippie hub, and grass-roots counterculture buzzed with societal change~ Today, algorithms and funded resistance~ secretly funded, fabricated revolutions unfolding with merely a thumb scroll. 'Likes' accumulate like manifestos, mostly unread. Then draft cards burned in courageous hands sit-ins at Woolworth’s counters, acts of interracial courage, swallowed by journalists’ flashbulbs. Now, hashtags appear like bruises, justice fading into trending threads. Then the moon hung like a promise~ we touched it with slide rules and hope. Now, the sky’s a graveyard of satellites, and Mars glows redder than the forgotten button. The times? Still a ‘Changin~ just faster and louder, yet somehow quieter. you may read the related memoir vignette at: poetrysoup.com/short_stories/the_september_wind_13646
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