Women’s March: Telluride & Beyond

21 Jan Women’s March: Telluride & Beyond

Down Colorado Avenue

On the 1st anniversary of the Women’s March, January 20 & January 21, thousands gathered in major metro areas and small towns like Telluride across the globe, from New York City to Cheyenne, Wyoming, from Washington to Rome. According to the New York Times, 

“A year after millions of people turned out for the Women’s March and took to the streets en masse to protest President Trump’s inauguration, demonstrators gathered on Saturday in cities across the United States, galvanized by their disdain for Mr. Trump and his administration’s policies.

A deluge of revelations about powerful men abusing women, leading to the #MeToo moment, has pushed activists to demand deeper social and political change. Progressive women are eager to build on the movement and translate their enthusiasm into electoral victories in this year’s midterm elections…”

She is a beautiful free spirit, a buff, curvy woman prone to lobbing curve balls at ignorance. She is a dedicated environmental activist and river hound, writer and performance artist, eloquently and blissfully profound, sometimes profane, but never pedantic.

Elissa

That description applies equally to the dearly departed Goddess of Glen Canyon, Katie Lee, a Telluride favorite, and to the Poet Laureate of San Miguel County, Elissa Dickson, a clone of Lee – and Telluride favorite too.

On Saturday, January 20, the Women’s March in Telluride was a relatively small, but impassioned gathering of like-minded people – small, that is, compared to last year in town when hundreds showed up, braving the snow. And small compared to the marches held simultaneously in major cities around the country, where crowds hit hundreds of thousands, everyone wielding protest signs and sporting pink hats.

The local march opened with Elissa reciting a few poems, her finely tuned words proving once again a woman’s mind can reason about unreasonable things – like the thick-tongued policies of the current administration. Did the White House shrink from the barbs like Dracula from a crucifix? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Undaunted, the Telluride crowd soldiered on, everyone from Elsa, the tiny granddaughter of Michael Goldberg and Ashley Hayward, co-owners of the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art  – “12 pounds of resistance,” per Michael – to friends, moms, dads, and dogs, to a person strong, vocal, undeterred and united in our determination to fight back at the polls.

Down Colorado Avenue

Which is poetry to our ears.

Changing What I Cannot Accept

(Check out the parade below. And don’t miss Elissa, who stars at the Talking Gourds Poetry reading Tuesday evening. Details here.)