Averse to War

Don't you hear this hammer ring?

I'm gonna split this rock

And split it wide!

When I split this rock,

Stand by my side.

The poem's original theme of worker solidarity lends itself to the task at hand.

"Split this rock. What rock?" Sonia Sanchez, the fierce, soft-voiced, veteran Philadelphia-based poet asks rhetorically at Busboys. "Any rock that interferes with progress. Any rock that attempts to kill."

Dennis Brutus, the revered South African poet with flowing gray hair who spent time in jail with Nelson Mandela, wades through the thronging restaurant wearing a hooded sweat shirt under his sports coat and greets Sanchez, who stands out with her red knit cap. Does poetry matter?

Sanchez: "Nobody is saying poetry is the only avenue, but it's a mighty powerful one."

Brutus: "I think of someone like Shelley. 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' . . . These are the people I think will kick alive the spirit of anger and resistance."

Between readings and pilgrimages to Hughes's and Whitman's haunts, the poets attend panel discussions such as "Writing in a Warrior Culture" and "Personal and Political: The Difficult Art of Writing a Manuscript of Poems That Bear Witness."

In these intense seminars, the poets get down to the nitty-gritty of craft. Overheard: