A rally in Washington, DC to transform the U. S. schools provided an example of merging poetry, performance, and research for social justice activism. The arts-based research forms of a/r/tography and performance ethnography provided the poet/performer/researcher/activist with frameworks of sense-making that were fluid, intrasubjective, and intersubjective. The work included ethnographic insights based on decades of lived experience for the poet and the audience that was embodied through performance. Metaphor, metonym, imagery and other elements of poetry, including the process of revision, were used to mine and represent attention to complexity as necessary for transformation and to pose simplistic thinking as a limited and narrowing aspect of social movement.