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# Sous les pavés, la plage
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/sous-les-paves-la-plage/
- Published: 2023-12-02T19:54:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-15T05:02:53.000Z
- Description: Too much talk of revolution makes me hungry, and there is little in the fridge that makes one believe in a better world:
- Author: Andy
- Tags: Be The Change, poetry, Politics, protest, social change, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

Too much talk of revolution  
makes me hungry, and there  
is little in the fridge that makes  
one believe in a better world:  
strawberries growing mold too  
soon, asparagus I'm unlikely  
to prepare, all of it bound either  
for the compost or the toilet,  
and how are we not to grow  
cynical, how are we to escape  
this humdrum life of leisure,  
this talk and talk that doesn't  
bleed? And what do the maimed  
want, those buried beneath the  
rubble, choking on dust and  
feeling around for lost limbs?  
Am I to be a spokesman for  
them? Are you? *Sous le pavés,* 
*la plage!*—*beneath the cobblestones,* 
*the beach!*—they cried in Paris  
in 1968, when revolution was  
in the air, in the hearts of students  
the world over. How many went  
on to humdrum lives of leisure,  
sipping wine and reading political  
treatises after a day at some job?  
Today again the students are mad.  
They call for ceasefires and  
divestment, no war for oil, no police  
brutality, no ideals left to rot like  
uneaten fruit. It's easy to laugh off  
the young, yet we were all young once  
and thought love was forever ecstatic  
and the heart could never grow old.  
I am not so old myself, though I hurt  
my back the other day and hobble  
to the fridge between meetings, between  
poems, between dreams tempered  
by pain and loss and disillusion.  
All I know is if you touch a nerve  
it can hurt or arouse or both, and when  
the cynic goes to bed with the idealist  
there is no more talk, for all of life becomes  
hips and lips and limbs, and even after  
we are too content to care about our  
violent disagreements, at least for a while...  
at least for a blissful while.