Not the asking but the giving answer,
unambiguous:
the glove pulled tight over a gentle firm fist,
black wool against the floodlit air of Mexico,
and the arm goes up,
not lifted but resisting gravity
lifting toward hope,
not down, up,
up above the bowed head,
the closed eye,
the anthem spilling to the world,
and we were wrong to call it choice,
like breathing the air of life,
because conscience is the great eye refusing
to look away

and naming it for what it is
in the power of a hand,
the hand that holds the tool;
and somewhere on the lower step,
an Australian in his quiet white skin
pins on the badge and also stands,
because standing with salute is a sentence
the body writes when the mouth has been
told to be reasonable,
to wait,
to let the season pass,

and the fist does not strike, it holds,
it is held, the power of a silent word,
the small un-killable yes inside the enormous no,
and the stadium does not understand it yet,
will boo it, will exile it to the long lean years,

but the gesture is kept warm,
kept like a seed that holds life still,
and the glove answers out of 1968,
answers across the decades of our forgetting,

so, raise it, raise it, hold it high,
and there was never any permission,
there was only the after and what we did with it.

 

13/6/2026