What is the future? (political poetry from the Senate Floor)

I know it is an uphill battle.
I have heard many of my colleagues.
I hear the arguments:
Reserve your gunpowder for the future.

What is the future
if it changes so dramatically at this moment in time?
What happens to those people who count on us to stand up and protect them
now, not later, not at some future time?

This is the choice for the Court now.
I reject those notions that there ought to somehow be some political calculus about the future.
This impact is going to be now.
This choice is now.

-- Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, speaking in the Senate on why the Alito nomination must be filibustered and why Judge Alito must not be confirmed to the Supreme Court, January 27, 2006