THE MAKING OF PEACE: A POETRY BROADSIDE SERIES

The Night Our Troops Invade
Believing myself a citizen of peace,
I go outside to commune with the stars.
A handful, squeezed between tall dwellings,
blink, inscrutable as the Great Sphinx,
older than any human nation.
I wonder about all those dark years,
the millions of years light traveled
to reach my eyes at this very moment,
all the lives that rose and fell therein,
undocumented, ungrieved.
My reverie is broken by the eerie calls
of Cuckoos, nocturnal invaders,
parasitic birds who abandon their young
to the nests of other species,
devoid of basic maternal instinct.
The blinking stars, those blind historians,
beg this riddle: how we finite creatures,
lucky to have been given life in a universe
of infinite void, can fail to love every
being whose eyes reflect back into our own?
Lana Hechtman Ayers
Seven Turtles


On the Withlacoochee last Saturday, seven turtles
in graduated sizes queued on a log, routine
as the osprey nests, empty this time of year,
normal as the occasional alligator, its blunt nose
and hooded eyes half-submerged, as are most fears
most of the time, until a plane slams into a building
or a son can’t be found. We are spoiled, you and I,
guilty of saying of the good dark bread on our plates
not, how delicious, but where’s the rest. And so
with the osprey nests, the turtles, even the palms
leaning so low they parallel the water. But now
a wood stork crosses our bow. And another.
And when we look left, to where river-flow
complicates into cypress creek, we see it:
hundreds of wood storks with their back-edged
wings, hunched liked priests in the trees.
And I remember a morning in Cairo
years ago, when the veiled figure next to me
on the side of the aisle that was all women
turned, and took my western hands in hers
as if my fingers might be breakable, as if
she loved them, and said in the only language
we both understood: Pass this on.
Lola Haskins
(c) Lola Haskins 2006