Poems about Peace

"Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread."
-- Pablo NerudaWage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.


wage peace - judyth hill - september 12, 2001
Peace is every step. The shining red sun is my heart. Each flower smiles with me. How green, how fresh all that grows. How cool the wind blows. Peace is every It turns the endless path to joy.
--Thich Nhat Hanh
Intoxicated
words and the idea
Only in silence
do we ever find the answers. Only in licked raw surfaces do our realities li We are what we hate. We hate what we are. what we've become as innocence becomes our enemy. the falling of a hope. the reaction. the rising of faith.
Is the edge the place we find when closing our eyes doesn't close out the world? or is it when it does Is that the place we go to for it all to make sense? or is it the place where ignorance is bliss Change, the only constance Change, the only thing that binds us to ignorance, besides the substance knowledge is defined by. all we need is one moment to hold when every other one has been swallowed by our pride. And here we stand two strangers. intoxicated by words and the idea of truth and beauty and love. and finding comfort in darkness that shouldn't finding each other in darkness that does.
Dana Ortner
Grade 9 2003



THE LESSON FOR TODAY

The Roshi suggests we take a tangerine
in the palm of the hand,
feel its weight, its intimate smooth-roughness,
observe its color, color of amazement.
He says to puncture with a fingernail
the cunning floating shell
of our tangerine, release the scent
which drifts out to us like a soul
on leave from Paradise.
We will marvel then at the segments:
toes and toes of tangerine;
will take, with each bite,
the depth-charge of the color orange
for which exist no rhymes
in English.
We will be, that is,
fully aware of one tangerine.
Entirely aware of any one thing.
Imagine, then, the Aware-Ones, in their billions,
passing on from fruit in the palm of the hand
to the cancer wards;
the killing fields;
the mutilated children.
Barry Spacks

At the creek by my house,
I hear the water splashing against my legs.
The water rushes through its path.
A small wave makes a quiet crash.
The water rumbles while I bend down
to feel the cold water.
I hear the minnows swishing while they swim.
When I go to the creek, I feel peaceful.

-- Sierra, 2nd grade

Peacemaker

She never lit a candle in a vigil.
She never raised a voice for human rights.
She slept on public benches in the summer--
In basement shelters on cold, winter nights.

She never held a sign and demonstrated.
She moved no one to action with her words,
But in the park each day, by roaring traffic,

She knelt to share her bread crumbs with the birds.

--Debbie Parvin

REHEARSAL SPACE FOR WAR

by Alison Hawthorne Deming

East of Gila Bend two jets release payloads
that billow the desert dirt, rehearsal space for war

is what the desert means to military minds, a meaning
the civilian mind will never understand, as it walks

through the details of the day: buy bananas, check
bank balance, water plants. There is a god that lives

in the weapons, a power that exists in the mind
capable of imagining that to slaughter people

is a just way to solve injustice. What fool or monster
would instruct children to launch bombs upon the bully

terrrorizing a crowded playground? To be a fool or monster
is to believe there is only one way. Avenging genocide

is an expensive means of focusing the mind.
The civilian mind rehearses taking in the wounded,

their faces sinking below the reflective darkness
of public memory, taking in the warriors who will own

forever their elation in battle, the pageantry of war
that comes home and joins the ticker tape parade,

the Disneyland soundstage of victory, a word
that cannot disguise suffering -- the smoke and blade

fever of destruction that leaves the living to question,
Was it right, what I did? Was it mine, the choice to quit?