“Driving the Bus: After the Anti-War March,” first published in 2003, is only indirectly about the war; its focus is a loving portrait of the bus driver taking the protesters home. The protest they are returning from is in the background, getting three lines of the poem, and those being less vivid than the lines showing us the driver, her ordinary compassion and inevitable involvement in the consequences of war, when soldiers come home “cocked like guns, sometimes they blasted and / blew their own heads off, sometimes a woman’s face,” like the face of the driver’s best friend.
Minnie Bruce Pratt (b. 1946) was born in Selma, graduated from a segregated high school, and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa a year after segregationist governor George Wallace had “stood in the schoolhouse door.” She got her doctorate at Chapel Hill, worked as a grassroots organizer, taught at historically black universities, collaborated on lesbian-feminist projects with Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde and others, has published six books of poetry, and teaches at Syracuse University. She is the widow of the writer and activist Leslie Feinberg.
We had a different driver on the way home. I sat
on the seat behind her, folded, feet up like a baby,
curled like a silent tongue in the dark jaw of the bus
until she flung us through a sharp curve and I fell.
Then we talked, looking straight ahead, the road
like a blackboard, one chalk line down the middle.
She said, nah, she didn’t need a break, she was good
to the end. Eighteen hours back to home when
she was done, though. Fayetteville, North Carolina,
a long ways from here. The math of a mileage marker
glowed green. Was Niagara Falls near Buffalo? She’d
like to take her little girl some day, too little now, won’t
remember. The driver speaks her daughter’s name,
and the syllables ring like bells. I say I lived in her town
once, after another war. The boys we knew came home
men cocked like guns, sometimes they blasted and
blew their own heads off, sometimes a woman’s face.
Like last summer in Fort Bragg, all those women dead.
She says, One was my best friend. Husband shot her
front of the children, boy and girl, six and eight. She calls
them every day, no matter where she is. They get very
upset if she doesn’t call. Her voice breaks, her hands
correct the wheel, the bus pushes forward, erasing nothing.
There was a blue peace banner from her town today,
and we said stop the war, jobs instead, no more rich
men’s factories, refineries, futures built on our broke bodies.
She said she couldn’t go to the grave for a long time,
but she had some things to get right between them so
she stood there and spoke what was on her mind. Now
she takes the children to the grave, the little boy
he wants to go every week. She lightly touches and
turns the big steering wheel. Her hands spin
its huge circumference a few degrees here, then
there. She whirls it all the way around when she
needs to. Later I hear the crinkle of cellophane. She
is eating some peppermint candies to stay awake.